Spring RTS Engine

CA needs more players

special abilities..smells like blizzard.

DZHIBRISH wrote:special abilities..smells like blizzard.

Every modern RTS has abilities, you make it sound like Blizzard has a monopoly on them.

DZHIBRISH wrote:special abilities..smells like blizzard.

shut up

no.im just saying that ca is already so micro intensive cause the defensive structures are weaker that adding abilities to units when you have so many might make it very hard to use it all.

Ya, thats the thing about CA that kind of puts me off. I liek strong def and bad units (comparatively). llts etc are a total waste of metal in ca. Might as well be nerfed

KDR_11k wrote:

DZHIBRISH wrote:special abilities..smells like blizzard.

Every modern RTS has abilities, you make it sound like Blizzard has a monopoly on them.

Well, it depends if the abilities are automated or not. Every OTA unit knew how to use it's abilites on it's own (except builders - you have to tell them to build stuff). The only special powers you need to give specific orders on are nukes and d-guns, neither of which happen often enough to be heavy micro.

This is very different from something like the Ghost Lockdown - if you get late enough into the game that Ghosts are used, then they're dirt cheap and super-powerful if you can manage locking down each and every target you see, but it's all manual.

I think that's what he was talking about with "special powers". Like, spells. But, to the best of my knowledge, CA doesn't have any of those.

But as for the issue of offensiveness - I think every AA-derived mod has been a bit heavy on the offensive side since Caydr buffed vehicles. Mobile artillery and stealth-attacks are ignored in favor of spamming assault-units, massing them, and overrunning the defensive line.

Ill keep this in mind in my mod. I tend to enjoy longer games, and buffing def to let the superunits come out is my idea of a fun and epic battle. Not I SPAEM GATOR LOL. I am just saying that CA has perhaps taken this too far (but really its just my playing style thats no good for the mod)

Strong defenses mean it's harder to do damage to a base and you need larger forces to breach the defenses which IMO makes play less dynamic as it prevents early raiding and forces you to pretty much remain in your base or try to pick cons off before they build defenses, makes attacks futile until you've built up a force of a certain size which means downtime.

KDR, I'm not talking about an extreme amount. Not saying play SimBase - just AA1, when Kbots were as strong as vehicles (and thus, vehicles were kinda useless) - frontal attacks were still done, but they were more rare and artillery attacks were more popular, or using recon to find a weak-spot before spamming a million rockos to storm the entryway.

Obviously this approach had it's flaws, but my point is that it is something I miss.

I dont think defenses in CA are too weak, they are just more specialized .. and of course none stand chance to specialized artilery etc. units..

Blocking some gap takes more than building 3 llt .. you need stardust/scorcher and emp tower and hlt for it to survive some time..
And even this can be outranged by hammers or l1 arty.

sorry is there an AAI config for CA anywhere? it maye take "10 seconds" to do but I have no idea how to do it and a change from RAI would be good :)

Unlike BA, XTA etc...

CA Carefully gives roles to every single unit. No unit is roleless, if it is, the next commit would have that unit role-ful ?!?!
The defensive structures have their own roles
EG

Light Laser Tower's Role is to stop Small ammounts of spam or generally 1v1 units.
Rocket Towers are generally to catch ticks, fleas, roaches, ak and peewee and other scouting units which may cause problems of security.
Stardust/whatsitsname are anti swarm... nuff said
Heavy Laser Towers are for outranging other towers like and cathing artillery/ mobile missile battery units where & where you don't have units present to deal with them allowing your units to be used else where.

:]

Okay sorry guys, but i was reading this backwards and i was all getting ready for a serious response and then i realise you guys are all responding to my comment about the fido.

Ehem.

Bark and Embark are orders you can give to a unit that will make an idle atlas come to it, and pick it up.

Basically this means that instead of finding the atlas and giving it load and unload orders, you can click on the unit you wish to load, and it will find an idle atlas to do the job for you. You dont need to hunt down an atlas.

So basically, this is to REDUCE micro. The bark/embark is a pun on the fact the fido is a dog.

Now, on to some of the issues adressed:

Special Abilities

tl;dr- CA mostly sticks to the AA/OTA model for which units need micro and which dont (Cloak, on/off for armour, etc) and we make good use of units with these abilities- we arent likely to add in very many new unique special abilities beyond these. In fact, we are more into automating trivial crap and making the whole pace of the game faster.

Things like closing or going 'off' to get an armour bonus exists on a number of units- the Anni and DDM most notably but even the core mex (bet you didnt know that, but its useless)- but in CA on a mobile unit, the egg. Its the same mechanic, but yes, it is a 'special ability' that needs to be micro'ed in the same way as a Blizzard game.

Remember that Cloaking is another major thing that not only has to be micro'ed but always comes with a cost that needs to be expertly balanced. In AA based mods, bombers wont drop their bombs on anything you dont specifically order them to- much like a special ability. Several other units, like the Commando (With until recently a noautofire weapon AND a capture feature AND a cloak- micro overload) the spy (Self-d's with an EMP, cloak) and others have these sorts of special abilities that are never activated without player intervention. Others, like the Roach or Rocko benefit hugely from micro in their movement orders and it increases the effectiveness of the unit manyfold. In fact, a kbot vs kbot war is prettymuch micro, who has more time to devote to it (Same as BA).

However, CA's approach is to reduce meaningless, trivial or unwanted micro. It is, as noted, much more aggressive and frantic than BA, and you fight almost non-stop, the whole game, from the very start to the very finish. We dont need to add on more burdensome, easily automated tasks to make your life more difficult- if the game isnt constantly presenting you with meaningfully difficult decisions then we arent doing our job as designers and we wont add useless ones just to artificially inflate this difficulty.

My personal philosophy is that micro is the 4th resource of the game, and some units are more micro expensive, and some units are less micro expensive. You can play the whole game with tanks (which, as long as you keep them moving, is prettymuch all the micro you need) or you can go all out with mobile dt's and roaches, blocking the line of fire to your roaches with the mobile DT to get them into range, and other incredibly micro intensive pro strategies that are hard to pull off but rewarding to a good player. We endeavour to have both options in the game.

Aggressive vs Defensive game

CA used to be too porcy, people didnt like it, the current version is perhaps too far the other direction but i enjoy this much more, TBH. Id agree that CA is for a more aggressive kind of player.

But i get bored in BA team games. In CA you dont get that long boring break in while people are teching up, you never get a defensive line which is nothing but static d while the players spend their econ on berthas, nukes or air- you always have to have a mobile army or he'll just kill you. This doesnt mean the game ends early, it just means its action packed for the whole duration.

I dont want to have to spend a huge amount of time simbasing just so i can get to the fun bits. War is what the game is about, not a reward at the end of a long slow porc.

Saktoth wrote: Bark and Embark are orders you can give to a unit that will make an idle atlas come to it, and pick it up.

Embark is nice. It really helps. But what about giving the embark-command additionaly a destination location so that the atlas will not only pick the unit up but will also automatically unload at the destination point? I think this would even remove the last manual step of flying the unit to destination and unload it.

Complicated wrote:Unlike BA, XTA etc...

CA Carefully gives roles to every single unit. No unit is roleless, if it is, the next commit would have that unit role-ful ?!?!
The defensive structures have their own roles
EG

Light Laser Tower's Role is to stop Small ammounts of spam or generally 1v1 units.
Rocket Towers are generally to catch ticks, fleas, roaches, ak and peewee and other scouting units which may cause problems of security.
Stardust/whatsitsname are anti swarm... nuff said
Heavy Laser Towers are for outranging other towers like and cathing artillery/ mobile missile battery units where & where you don't have units present to deal with them allowing your units to be used else where.

:]

ahah


oh wow

you have opened sleksa's eyes.

tears of joy

Complicated wrote:Unlike BA, XTA etc...

CA Carefully gives roles to every single unit. No unit is roleless, if it is, the next commit would have that unit role-ful ?!?!
The defensive structures have their own roles
EG
:]

Please do not put Xta in the same category as BA. You obviously have not played xta enough to know.... also, this is how stupid you sound, "lalalalalla."

Sleksa wrote:tears of joy

slek cries gypsy tears