Complete Annihilation News

[Otherside]

a feature that could be handy to other modders ?? and shows stuff u can do in spring so worthy of its own post

[smoth]

still belongs in the CA thread.

[Peet]

a feature that could be handy to other modders ?? and shows stuff u can do in spring so worthy of its own post

By that logic there should be an additional thread for CA every 20 revs



(don't get any funny ideas on me now)

[Otherside]

smoth u make a topic everytime u remodel a gundam unit . so that means all your gundam units should be in one thread and all mr D's models shouldnt have there own thread...

[Pxtl]

a feature that could be handy to other modders ?? and shows stuff u can do in spring so worthy of its own post

By that logic there should be an additional thread for CA every 20 revs



(don't get any funny ideas on me now)

Rather than spamming the forum, wouldn't it be nice if there was a version-controlled, web-based documentation system for Spring that anyone can edit that CA developers could use to post their useful code tidbits that they wish to make available to other modders? And wouldn't it be great if that documentation system had a link right in the menu bar of the site, right next to the "news" section?

[smoth]

smoth u make a topic everytime u remodel a gundam unit . so that means all your gundam units should be in one thread and all mr D's models shouldnt have there own thread...

That is art and modeling, where we discuss... take a wild assed guess..?

THAT'S RIGHT MODELING...

not art and modeling for a specific game/mod and guess what champ? Others beside mr.d and myself do it. Having one thread with all your models and art is only done by starwars and s44.

Rather than spamming the forum, wouldn't it be nice if there was a version-controlled, web-based documentation system for Spring that anyone can edit that CA developers could use to post their useful code tidbits that they wish to make available to other modders? And wouldn't it be great if that documentation system had a link right in the menu bar of the site, right next to the "news" section?

or just a huge resource thread for people who need it that few people including myself posts to.

[Otherside]

RANDOM WIP..

thats seems a good place to put them

[smoth]

but it isn't random... oh ho.

[Peet]

Whatever, I give up on this issue...you have my indirect permission through apathy, go ahead and flood the boards and someone else can deal with it or not.

[Acidd_UK]

My 2p - Jumpjets look cool. Great job. However, a minor cosmetic issue - when they take off and land the smoke looks ok, but whent he bot is moving laterally, the smoke seems ot be still coming off its feet, rather than being an extension/transformation of the 'thrust jets'. I have no idea how easy it is to do, and maybe a better option would be to drop the smoke entirely, or to drop the jets entirely. Either way I don't think the two quite mesh atm. Either way, jumpjets are cool

[quantum]

The effect is just a placeholder. It's the Storm muzzle flash repeated about 30 times per second.

[Otherside]

guess thats why it eats a ton of fps wen looking straight at it at pointblank range

[manored]

I just had 2 ideas that other people had at the same time, what is a clear message from fate that they should be added :) so I am posting here:

First, add a building especialized into dismanteling units, that is, eating your arm back. The idea is that normal reclaiming takes too much micro, so instead you would have this building capable of loading units and reclaiming then very fast, and all you would need to do to so would be to tell then move in.

Second, I think that energy should be removed from the mod, keeping only metal and buildpower was resources. Main function of energy, in my understandement, is to keep a metal burst from allowing a player to hyper-spam things... but if we tweaked build power it would be enough to achieve this effect, so I dont think energy is necessary. Mexes should probally be made more expensive then, and inneficient metal maker structure should be added, and fixed defenses should be made more expensive to compensate the vanished energy need.

Other and probally simpler option would be to remove energy build-costs, so you would only need metal and build-power to build stuff and energy to power things such as shields, BBs and overdrive up.

[Otherside]

1) Nano turets (no need for building bloat they do the job fine)


2) i disagree manored i think losing energy is dumb

apart from being the second resource it also reprsents running and firing cost of weapons and should be kept.. (also affects stuff like dgun)

stop trying to simplify CA and turn it into sandbox annihilation k thx

as if we didnt have enuff having to deal with commercial games do it to us, we dont need it in a good free open source rts that has depth

[manored]

Nanoturrets dont really do the job fine, require too much micro... tough It would probally be simpler to add a "area reclaim ally" function, meant to make reclaiming units and your own dt/fort wall easier.

Simplifing a game doesnt removes depth, the less kinds of things you have to control more you have to think on how you are going to do that... just look to castle wars :) Beside a economic simplification would open space for more militar complexity, since players would have more time to do their militar stuff.

I dont really think I will manage to convince people to remove e tough, so I will concentrate on the second point: How about reserving e for powering things on only, and leave build power and metal for building? It would eliminate part of peoples economic worries winhout eliminating the need of E... off course build powers would have to be nerfed.

[Saktoth]

How often do you want to reclaim stuff? Like your factory? You'll surely have ample BP around your factory. Why on earth would you need this?

Either way, CA is looking towards having a 'reduce to wreck' function as the only method of reclamation, so that you dont get that awkward situation where you have two bars, build percent left and HP when constructing (and the unit is non-functional until build percent is 100) but only one bar, HP, when reclaiming, which is especially irksome with gradual reclaim. Thus, the only way to reclaim will be to scrap things and reclaim the corpse.

This is all just concept phase stuff now though.


On BP and E. You're correct when you say that E works as a limiter to metal income (which fluctuates dramatically by reclaim and territory) and you're also correct that BP alone can act as a limiter. But, thats kind of a different game you're talking about.

The main reason not to use BP as the primary economic throttle is that BP is logistical- it is how, where and on what you can spend your resources. A player needs some freedom in that logistical aspect of the game and thus the basic ability to construct anything should be relatively cheap, portable, etc in a dynamic open-ended game in the manner of CA.

Buildpower is also a major source of metal, through expansion and reclaim, and all you need for more buildpower is buildpower + metal, making the economy pretty exponential relatively fast (a poor economic throttle.

Adding in something beyond buildpower that you must invest in to increase your rate of spending ensures that a portion of any economic gain is initially going towards infrastructure.

In a game like Starcraft, where increasing your unit construction rate (barracks, factory etc) is a distinct and separate investment from increasing your harvesting rate (your economic throttle), this works fine. But in OTA based games constructors are more akin to a barracks from a *craft game (with the distinct difference that they also make statics, which harvesters do in *craft games) and harvesters are more like mexes and energy (IE, they determine your rate of income).

[Jamuk426]

I kind of agree with manored's idea, so I'm going to join in and post my own idea on the subject.

The way the game is set up you can get as much metal as you want if you have enough e, so why not just combine them, since what you can build is basically a combination of the two.

So, right now it works something like-
production capacity = METAL + logENERGY

Why are we going to the trouble of balancing both for every unit instead of using production capacity?
An energy or metal stall could simply be a stall.

Plus, the supposed gameplay value of having multiple resources so that different unit types can get different ratios seems pointless to me.

In the case of air, the only thing making E a higher cost than M would do is make people expand less because more time is spent on making energy and less time taking land. Air can take land the fastest, why should they have more incentive to stay and build their base?

Higher metal costs for tanks makes expanding more important, but shouldn't expanding always be important? I mean just raise production cap costs for them because higher movement speeds makes gathering resources easier, then *OMG* the problem is solved.

[Jamuk426]

And on a side note, why not make the minimum e storage given by the com available even when the com dies? It would reduce the detriment from losing your com, that way more easier to fight over the wreckage. Changing this would make slowed corpse reclaim more beneficial, because the player who lost the unit would have more of a chance to recover.
Having 20 e and 20 m makes even building 1 storage unit a hassle...
Plus it usually results in a game over if you lose it even in midgame when you still rely heavily on the com's storage ability. Midgame you might have a few thousand in storage, removing the commander can take a large portion of that.

The only other solution would be to buff storage and make it harder to destroy. This would make it so that half of your resources don't go out the window when a single scout runs past your defences.

However this would also make less protection necessary, which I assume was the intention of making storage so fragile.

[manored]

Storages are very cheap and efficient tough, you can make a lot for a small time and cost. Thus people should keep suplementary storages from very early in the game, but most people forget... :)

I believe that the problems regarding the nature of BP could be solved by having builders build very slow, but adding a building capable of amplifing the build speed of builders anywhere on the map as needed. There would be a limit of max amplification to not make having more builders in one spot unneeded. The diference between this and current is that (assuming you have as much metal as you want since we are not discussing metal handling here) with energy you are either building very fast cause you have enough or very slow cause you dont, and with build power you would build at a slow pace that increases or, if you start building lots of things in one moment, decreases at a moderate rate.

I dont not believe BP is a poor economic "brake". It acts pretty much the same as energy, that is, it requires you to spend resources to increase the speed at wich you can spend resources... in the same manner that you could use part of a metal burst to spam builders and then spam militar, right now you can spam energy structures and builders, and then spam militar.

Indeed its very rare for us to want or need to reclaim something ours, but then we do, and if per chance it is a arm, it is really micro intensive. I think one special reclaim function making the unit reclaim (or wreck and reclaim) even allied units would solve this, altough I do not know how hard it would be to do this and thus whenever it would be worth the effort or not.

One reason to defend energy would be for "kill energy and attack defenses" tactic, but if you think about it such a tactic is not that viable in a game where resources dont require transportation, since energy from the otherside of the map can be "teletransported" quickly if you just shut down some things, so enemy would need to kill pretty much all your energy to stop your defenses and since energy is linked to economy that would already mean the end of the game for him anyway. Also I see it sort of lame that currently in CA fixed defenses need energy while units do not, while the most logical would be oposite, even more if you consider that there are units far stronger than fixed defenses.

[Jamuk426]

Your comment on the energy stalling is interesting, but I don't see how that would be any different set up with only one resource.

The only difference with my set up is that it doesn't matter what resource building you destroy.

E and M stalls will be the same thing, and so you can recover from a stall by expanding as well as building more generators.

The differences in gameplay will be almost imperceptible if you have only 1 resource, and will simplify balancing and economy changes massively. That way economy changes such as the recent ones would be less of a shock for the players, because there is more flexibility on how to deal with shortages.

However, you are probably right about the storage suggestion.
It just seemed silly that the com was tied in with storage for no apparent reason.