Summoner: The Defiler War

[TassadarZeratul]

S:TDW is a mod featuring pure space combat and an unusual economy system. As the mod is set in space, traditional RTS concepts such as terrain and choke points are absent. Also, the concept of a base is also absent to an extent, because there is no real advantage to building structures close together: There are no defensive structures, and all races have some form of teleportation ability. In fact, due to powerful splash weapons such as the Defiler Blasphemer and the Human Bombadeer and Sagittarius, there is some advantage to NOT doing so.

Summoner's economy system is somewhat odd. Every few seconds, you will recieve Null Matter equal to the square root of your current Null Matter count. (Null Matter is the game's only resource, besides SC-style Supply.) There is a single unit producer per player, called a Summonship. Summonships are mobile and can warp in units in only a few seconds, so you'll probably want to keep your Summonship near the front lines. However, if you lose your Summonship, you're eliminated, so you'll need to be careful.

[smoth]

This in this community is what we call "IMANOUNCINMAHMOD" it happens often. Someone posts an interesting idea and then it becomes vaporware. Please be a trend setter and actually do your project.

[Argh]

Looks good, I like the "character" of the units you're describing, and welcome to Spring.

Haven't had time to read whatever epic stuff has passed between you and the rest of the Forum yet. Don't worry if it seems like we're emo. We're a little hard on newbies because our learning curve is something like a Laffer Cliff of Fail- a lot of people end up being smears when their high-speed dreams hit the reality of Spring. Just how it goes.

That said, here is my probably worthless input: the basic econ design is looking strange, especially for an attrition game. If it's X = X + sqr X every time period, then if spending occurs that takes you lower than somewhere on a bell curve, your income becomes not-worth-noticing, and you'd effectively become crippled for the rest of the game. Not to mention if it's == 1 or < 1, heh. That does not necessarily sound like a newbie-friendly game design, even if you show them a cute UI that will describe how close to Doom they're going, econ-wise.

If you want to just enforce one-at-a-time spending like StarCraft, you can just plain do that via Lua fiat. Much less painful. If you want a spend-down econ where eventually both sides will run out of stuff, that is slightly less trivial to build in Lua, but not rocket science.

Sorry to start with a critique like that, this is something you can fix very easily, it's just that that math might not work very well.

[smoth]

yar gundam does cost up front on unit construction... not sure if that is going to be useful to you... I really would like to see a prototype or something...

[TassadarZeratul]

@Argh: That is a very good point about the economy. What if I made it so you could "un-summon" a unit, which gives you back part of the resources spent on it? That way, if you over-spend and your resource gain rate gets too low, you can just "un-summon" a few units. "Un-summoning" would require your Summonship to be very close to the unit you wish to "un-summon".

[smoth]

selling units? it is also in grts.

[TassadarZeratul]

Damnit, is there any economy system that HASN'T been used? QQ

I'll try to think of something more original.

[smoth]

why? look man, there are no original ideas. Here is one... complete a project and it actually is good. Because there are so few good games. Trust me if you execute your idea it will be fine. If you spend all your time trying to be different you will never break ground on anything.

because this kinda beat you to the punch:


before that:


before that:

[Argh]

There are entire alternative models for RTS economies that are, if not ignored, usually not seen in serious games. Keep in mind that, whether you're using the OTA economy style, where it's pay-as-you go, or the Starcraft style of pay-to-start-project, it's basically just emulating IRL economics, and there's nothing wrong with either model, which is why so many games stick with them.

But here are a few of the things that haven't been done a lot. There are others, these are just a few:

1. What you start with is what you get. I haven't seen a lot of that since Myth- it's hard to pull off, and really not that fun for MP.

2. You get tokens of a certain kind at intervals. Let's say you get 2 Uber Battleships to start, then a shipment of 10 Space Fighters, then 4 Rocket Barges, and then... you get it. IOW, remove the economics of it all, just give people Stuff, and maybe some other form of spending ("do I upgrade the fire-rate of all Tactical Lasers, or just the output of the Nova Blaster Nuke Cannon?"). This has some of the problems of 1, but worse (imo)- if you always get Rock on the first turn, then Paper, and your opponent gets the same thing, then why even bother fighting until you know you have Paper? And if he gets Scissors, Scissors, you just rush him, gg. Bobthedinosaur tried something like this for a bit, and while it was too early to say before he suddenly got banned from here, it just didn't feel like it was jelling.

3. Players only control over the economics is directly determined by the state of tactical play. IOW, the more ground you control, the more stuff you get... period. No fiddling about with Sim City stuff, you just go blow stuff up, and if you do it right, you win a city or destroy an enemy city, and move on. This is really hard to make a fun experience, imo, because it's amazingly easy for it to be a huge slippery slope, and thus rather un-fun, but that didn't stop S'44's team from using this model, and their fans obviously like it, so they must be doing something right.

4. All resources are captured from moving, auto-generated objects that continue to appear on the game board at random (whether this is herds of bison for some whacky Native American historical RTS, or floating Space Cities that your crazy Sky Pirates are ransoming for Neutronium Fillerups). That might actually be really interesting to play out, if you had to use combat units to capture them, and you had to make some sort of tradeoff ("do I go for that Haunted Locomotive creep with enough guys to get the payout, defend my base, or try and ambush the enemy?"). AoE played with this concept quite a bit, but never pushed it hard enough to make it an essential part of play except at the hardcore level (where animal placement could make or break MP matches).

5. Resources appear at random for all players. Kinda like the whacky "winds of magic" stuff in Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat.

So, you're saving for Rock... the next economy "roll" is made, and you can't quite buy it. But your opponent can buy Scissors. Ouch. It'd be extraordinarily hard to balance this well, without using a very specific flat-balance system and a lot of playtesting, imo. You'd basically have to have price tiers, and all factions would have to have rough equivalency at each tier.

It could be really boring, if the members of the tiers weren't really interesting. Or it could be really cool, as a betting game combined with a RTS. Hell, make it so that the more of the map is "conquered", the more the min/max of the die roll gets, and it could be genuinely interesting. Maybe.

6. Tokens are given to you, but the real power of the tokens is directly affected by their longevity and experience. I.E., it's a massive RPG, every guy in the game that survives some combat and time gains experience and becomes a lot more powerful over time. It'd be a bit like DoTA, but you can literally put guys out of harm's way to gain some XP, or maybe have a creep system like DoTA where they could kill some relatively-harmless guys before encountering the enemy. IRL, experienced forces are often a lot more effective than green troops, so this even makes sense- but in a RTS, it could mean that you will get pwned if the guy early-rushes, gets lucky and levels his dudes really fast, then comes back and finishes your second-wave stuff. About the only way I can see this working well is if static defenses were also able to level in this fashion, so that players, especially early, had a realistic chance to bounce back from early mistakes because rushing them out in one shot wasn't possible.



Meh. These are just a few things. There are plenty of ideas, basically. The key thing is that whatever it is, it's fair, it takes into account that if a game is over on first rush every time, nobody will play it MP because newbies find that utterly frustrating, and all good designs will give the superior player the right tools to finish the job. You don't have to have a "nuke" to make a RTS. You certainly don't have to have a standard economic model. It just has to make sense and provide good tools for people to play, reasons for doing certain things, and ofc it should be playtested so that it's actually fun.

[KaiserJ]

Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books.

i wish things these days had such sexist and lulzworthy titles.

[smoth]

i wish things these days had such sexist and lulzworthy titles.

look in the background... oh yeah, from a time when things were right in the world...

guywitheldarname: you really don't have to worry about doing something special really I am not kidding when I say it is OK to just go with something you feel is tried and true.

[lurker]

suddenly got banned

Er, do you have any idea what you're talking about?

[KDR_11k]

The goal of InterCAL was to produce something completely unprecedented. You're better off focusing on making it good and fun than to be unprecedented.

As for a space mod, I suggest taking a look at THIS to see if there's anything you can use there.

[CarRepairer]

Defiler was my favorite starcraft unit.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

defile 'er? I hardly know 'er!

[Pressure Line]

defile 'er? I hardly know 'er!

I doubt that's ever stopped you before IK