Any news about AA?
Moderator: Moderators
AA still alive
i saw cadyr on today testin AA:2.0 looks like he and his mod r makin a comeback
TAWD is reason enough to play Spring by itself. I'm less interested in yet another remix of TA than using the engine to make something interesting. WD and War at Sea are the mods for me. Don't sweat the fanbois, GZ! :)
Ghetto EDIT: And never let anyone tell you there are too many planes in WD. A plane for every role, for every budget! Take away my Alpha Jets and there will be trouble. :)
Ghetto EDIT: And never let anyone tell you there are too many planes in WD. A plane for every role, for every budget! Take away my Alpha Jets and there will be trouble. :)
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GrOuNd_ZeRo
- Posts: 1370
- Joined: 30 Apr 2005, 01:10
Hmmm
Well, if there are any Caydr-like people out there looking for a mod project to make use of the mounds and mounds of units out there, I have a suggestion:
Make more factions. But don't do the old "make a faction, balance it against OTA Arm and Core" - make a mod all about having tons of factions. Make them specialized, so that players in a teamgame play in a sort of "team fortress" style, with each player providing a special role. Cut down the main Arm and Core factions down to something more like the OTA sans-CC size, making each faction manageable enough to learn easily (learning a new full-ARM or full-CORE sized faction would be too much work) and mix and match the units around until you've got like 12 different factions.
Hell, once scripting is in place you could play with the basic concept of having a single faction - instead, give the player a "General" and two "Commanders" - take away the Commanders' D-Guns and nuke-deaths, and give them to the General, but make the General unable to build anything but the basic commander defenses - no construction buildings. Each commander can be from a different faction, so in this way you let the players mix and match - kinda like choosing which colours to play in Magic.
You could have one faction for each of the Arm/Core Final Frontier mods, put in the Mynn and Xect, split out some of the old Core and Arm CC stuff into an additional faction for each (like making hovercraft and the Krogoth part of the Core Contingency faction). Then construct more factions out of the miscellaneous stuff on the unit boards.
I'm just thinking out loud here, trying to think of a way to make a TA mod that incorporates the endless lists of free units out there without giving each player a hundred-page build list.
Make more factions. But don't do the old "make a faction, balance it against OTA Arm and Core" - make a mod all about having tons of factions. Make them specialized, so that players in a teamgame play in a sort of "team fortress" style, with each player providing a special role. Cut down the main Arm and Core factions down to something more like the OTA sans-CC size, making each faction manageable enough to learn easily (learning a new full-ARM or full-CORE sized faction would be too much work) and mix and match the units around until you've got like 12 different factions.
Hell, once scripting is in place you could play with the basic concept of having a single faction - instead, give the player a "General" and two "Commanders" - take away the Commanders' D-Guns and nuke-deaths, and give them to the General, but make the General unable to build anything but the basic commander defenses - no construction buildings. Each commander can be from a different faction, so in this way you let the players mix and match - kinda like choosing which colours to play in Magic.
You could have one faction for each of the Arm/Core Final Frontier mods, put in the Mynn and Xect, split out some of the old Core and Arm CC stuff into an additional faction for each (like making hovercraft and the Krogoth part of the Core Contingency faction). Then construct more factions out of the miscellaneous stuff on the unit boards.
I'm just thinking out loud here, trying to think of a way to make a TA mod that incorporates the endless lists of free units out there without giving each player a hundred-page build list.
actually I have played generals Zero Hour. and I didn't like it, but the other 5 people at the lan party did, and a few of them really didn't like TA (cavedog TA)... so a mod that played to this mentality would be nice.
But as a Team Fortress Style Game you would have to have different strategies to choose from.
Say you have a defensive team, that has good defense, but no long range offence and only well defended con-units to go out and set up forward bases around resourse sources.
Then you have a team designed for spamming, they would only have medium level 1.5 or whatever units but could be set-up to help the base guy speed up his production.
Then you would have the krogoth team that has 4 levels of k-bot labs and an otherwise balanced resource gathering skills and poor spamming (make the size of the outside of con-buildings too big for the build streams of the units reach the unit under contruction and no con-planes... also you could have it do the whole con builds a base and then the base builds a structure, and make con-units prohibitively expensive, so you are instead expected to have 1 unit go around and build a bunch of platforms which will be converted, at need, to necccessary structures) so you'd need to either build lot's of factories or have a spammer from another team help you out...
But as a Team Fortress Style Game you would have to have different strategies to choose from.
Say you have a defensive team, that has good defense, but no long range offence and only well defended con-units to go out and set up forward bases around resourse sources.
Then you have a team designed for spamming, they would only have medium level 1.5 or whatever units but could be set-up to help the base guy speed up his production.
Then you would have the krogoth team that has 4 levels of k-bot labs and an otherwise balanced resource gathering skills and poor spamming (make the size of the outside of con-buildings too big for the build streams of the units reach the unit under contruction and no con-planes... also you could have it do the whole con builds a base and then the base builds a structure, and make con-units prohibitively expensive, so you are instead expected to have 1 unit go around and build a bunch of platforms which will be converted, at need, to necccessary structures) so you'd need to either build lot's of factories or have a spammer from another team help you out...
The flipside of that suggestion is you put effort into designing, and implementing whole teams that are totally useless by themselves. Splitting along defence/offence is even worse, since long range weapons are a mainstay of modern defence.
The C&C thing was interesting - although I'd point out that more than half of the nine 'varients' were almost totally useless unless you had someone protecting you - and 'leaning' and army one way is an interesting idea (as in stronger, cheaper tanks, a few special planes, whatever). Declaring 'no ICBMs for you' or 'this team doesn't use planes' is such a fundamental change that it really challenges belief. All forces need the basics, and 'flavour' should be in what they do well, not what they can't do because the designer was a paper-scissors-stone whore.
The C&C thing was interesting - although I'd point out that more than half of the nine 'varients' were almost totally useless unless you had someone protecting you - and 'leaning' and army one way is an interesting idea (as in stronger, cheaper tanks, a few special planes, whatever). Declaring 'no ICBMs for you' or 'this team doesn't use planes' is such a fundamental change that it really challenges belief. All forces need the basics, and 'flavour' should be in what they do well, not what they can't do because the designer was a paper-scissors-stone whore.
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
- Posts: 7287
- Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29
Re: Hmmm
Make your own mod. No one comes into a project with simply a desire to splooge a bunch of units together, there are certian objectives you want to accomplish. Every new team you add makes the game that much more of a hell to balance. You need to find a way to make every team balanced to every other team... so at 3 teams you have 9 balance potentials to worry about, at 4, 16, at 5, 25. Well done multiple teams can be alot of fun, but it's a huge mod project to tackle, and requires an intese mastry of the game you are balancing to get right.Pxtl wrote:Well, if there are any Caydr-like people out there looking for a mod project to make use of the mounds and mounds of units out there, I have a suggestion:
Make more factions. But don't do the old "make a faction, balance it against OTA Arm and Core" - make a mod all about having tons of factions. Make them specialized, so that players in a teamgame play in a sort of "team fortress" style, with each player providing a special role. Cut down the main Arm and Core factions down to something more like the OTA sans-CC size, making each faction manageable enough to learn easily (learning a new full-ARM or full-CORE sized faction would be too much work) and mix and match the units around until you've got like 12 different factions.
Hell, once scripting is in place you could play with the basic concept of having a single faction - instead, give the player a "General" and two "Commanders" - take away the Commanders' D-Guns and nuke-deaths, and give them to the General, but make the General unable to build anything but the basic commander defenses - no construction buildings. Each commander can be from a different faction, so in this way you let the players mix and match - kinda like choosing which colours to play in Magic.
You could have one faction for each of the Arm/Core Final Frontier mods, put in the Mynn and Xect, split out some of the old Core and Arm CC stuff into an additional faction for each (like making hovercraft and the Krogoth part of the Core Contingency faction). Then construct more factions out of the miscellaneous stuff on the unit boards.
I'm just thinking out loud here, trying to think of a way to make a TA mod that incorporates the endless lists of free units out there without giving each player a hundred-page build list.
Look at XTA, it's still suffering from some frustrating balance issues, and it's being developed by some of the best total anihilation players out there.
GZ, don't sweat itGrOuNd_ZeRo wrote:Well thank you for your kindness.
I just have my days of frustration when I see most of my older stuff goes ignored in favor for old classic stuff that IMO is very unimaginative and not very inovative.
I made so many units that fit niches, from SAM busting aircraft to Shotgun Style heavy riot units.
All mods just come off as another variant of UH or Switech's bugfix with some custom (often the same) units.
alot of my old stuff can be found here:
http://www.unituniverse.com/
Some date back all the way to 1998 till 2001 so be warned.
I think it really just depends on who's doing the reporting. The reason AA was mentioned in that PC Gamer issue is probably just because it's virtually the only active site at PlanetAnnihilation, which is affiliated with Gamespy, which everyone in the business has to keep on good terms with.As a matter of fact, a few versions ago I used your cluster bomb :) But I found a better (for my purposes, anyway) technique of bomb dispersal. I actually think a lot of your work is quite impressive, but your units simply don't fit with OTA units, and I'm trying to keep to a the OTA look as much as possible.
Which units are 'fugly'? I'll replace em. It's all just numbers to me. I so rarely actually get to just play a real, casual, for-fun game anymore I forget visual things a lot of the time.
The Team Fortress idea is very interesting, might even be worth looking into, except that right now Spring only allows for two races and they must be named Arm and Core. Engine limitation...
Absolute Annihilation: Spring v2 Trailer: (14MB)
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ta-a ... p?download
Get it. You need WMV codec installed, but everyone does...
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ta-a ... p?download
Get it. You need WMV codec installed, but everyone does...
Re: Hmmm
Yeah, I realise balancing would be nigh-impossible, particularly given that I simply don't play enough to find and refine balancing issues. Still, it could be designed in such a way as to minimize that. Make sure each faction includes a basic featureset - everybody gets the main L1 necessitu buildings, and everyone gets a solid L1 ground unit, air-unit, and naval-unit platform. From there, you give some factions some odd edges. The idea of letting players choose factions is that it allows them to mix and match - so perfect balance is actually functionally impossible, because some starting combinations of factions will work better than others. Hell, in OTA there was no balance - some maps were better for Core, some were better for Arm, and that didn't stop it from being a good game.SwiftSpear wrote:Make your own mod. No one comes into a project with simply a desire to splooge a bunch of units together, there are certian objectives you want to accomplish. Every new team you add makes the game that much more of a hell to balance. You need to find a way to make every team balanced to every other team... so at 3 teams you have 9 balance potentials to worry about, at 4, 16, at 5, 25. Well done multiple teams can be alot of fun, but it's a huge mod project to tackle, and requires an intese mastry of the game you are balancing to get right.Pxtl wrote:snipped
Look at XTA, it's still suffering from some frustrating balance issues, and it's being developed by some of the best total anihilation players out there.
The idea is that by restricting each player to certain strategies, it allows/forces them to work with approaches that are based on their limitations. It also forces people into asymmetric warfare - these factors make balance incredibly difficult, but it also makes the game much more exciting.
There _are_ RTS games where the factions have fundamental differences. Look at StarCraft (although that's an example of surgically-precise balancing). Look outside the genre - team-fortress games make little attempt at balance - each class kicks incomparable ass within their specialty. Look at street-fighter games - many of these include dozens upon dozens of characters, each roughly successfully tweaked to be on par with every other character.
Still, it was just an idea. I won't be doing this anyways, I'm more interested in making multiplayer scripted maps than making a full mod.
