Spring RTS Engine

Every since the Extracredits Episode on it i dreamed of a mod, were the outcome of a battle would be also interesting for the looser, and thats not only through the wreckage.

Ta did alot of stuff right there, with wreckage and capturing+stunning. Could be even more interesting. What if there was a sort of "Weapons" destroyed inbetween stage? Were your mighty, experience rich unit might still be limping away from battle?

How about a "self-fixxing" maschine, that only needs cover behind wreckage to do so?

You could also add a combination system.. two halfdestroyed glued together by a battlefieldtechybot make one well working+ some spare wreckage.

This can be pulled to ridiculos levels.. units whos weapons get stronger if fired upon with another weapontype - the railgun who gets more dangerous if fired upon with emp.

I always imagined adding a social component to battles would be interesting. Units who fight better if with there team. Who are devastated/raging when one of there family-members dies. Love/Hate each other (your friendly fire almost killed us back then) among groups.

However - all of these can be expensive on a very limited ressource human attention. So if you want to integrate something like this, you also need a powerfull interface to keep the micro at bay. Or you have to drastically reduce Units (under your controll)

One thing i did integrate into journeywar was Off-Spring, meaning a unit has every experience levelup the possibility to spawn copys of itself* expLvl..

Another thing i haven tryied yet is power formations.. meaning, if you line up units in a certain way- they form a factory, or superweapon, (12 pewees in a row).

There is still lots of space unexplored in the rts genre.
Problem is it doesent have the hero attachment, direct action of other genres. TA did better there with the comander (better then c&c and sc), but still does look pale beside dota. Why should you emote for your boy with the gagball?

If the comander had some important strategic role beside first builder that could cut it.. something like a limited teleporter able to transport a troopgroup behind enemy lines. Or if you just couldnt kill it.. it just becomes something defenseless, slow, that has to crawl back to get repaired- or that could get imprisoned. It definatly would provide more drama. And drama is what we need the most.

I think RTS mods need to have more realistic physics. Currently some guns shoot farther than some missiles. Missile in real life accelerate in midair so it can stay in air much longer, fly farther, and can travel faster than projectile that is fired out of a gun when given certain amount of time.

Also fast leveling feature would be nice for terrain that is bit rough and hard to build at certain spots.

Prominence wrote:I think RTS mods need to have more realistic physics. Currently some guns shoot farther than some missiles. Missile in real life accelerate in midair so it can stay in air much longer, fly farther, and can travel faster than projectile that is fired out of a gun when given certain amount of time.

m16 - effective range: 500-800m
LAW - effective range: 200m

Not all "missiles" in spring are missiles, many of them are rocket launchers which are mostly short ranged.

Not all "guns" in spring are guns, many of them are artillery...

just sayin.

Well, put it more discreetly, when I said guns, I meant, guns, cannons, artilleries, and other projectile weapons that fires a projectile that does not accelerate while in midair. When I said missile, I meant rockets and missiles that have rocket engine to accelerate while in flight.

If you take a look at most modern warship in service today, you don't see big cannons on warship like they had back in WWII. All of them use missile as their primary weapon. And yes rocket can be made to fly shorter like the shoulder fired rocket that you mentioned, but most rocket based weapons fly farther than projectile weapons that does not accelerate in midair.

Yeah, projectileweapons are so old, they have to grab a rail to get 40 kilometers away and more.

Srsly, if we start with realism now, we might aswell introduce the one unit rolling artillery barrage via varying ballistic arcs. And to be honest, the long range rockets almost have nothing to do with rockets. They are super-reduced automated miniature-jets with a warhead. Who again are currently replaced by drones, because drones dont need half a hour like a cruise missile.

Lets give this thread a twist before it dies:
Tell us how your last designdecision was interesting - for the opponent of the player who is running into it?

suddenly no artillery units and arillery and missiles come from off screen and then this becomes the game: war game

------- Sink Annihilation/Experimental Races; A lot of races with each being a form of the strategy genera or experiment in it like some of the ones suggested here. Some examples bellow;
Dota like with a race basically being one unit. Similar to ZK coms and that one spring game called warhammer or something.
Shattered Galaxy/End of Nations mmortt style with a couple of units per race and practically no buildings and definitely no economy beyond location control.
Tower attack race who's buildings produce units for free and those units must immediately attack for some reason or another. Like kernel panic or that other one I can't remember the name of.
Physics gimmicks race that has crawl bombs that only work if launched by another crawl bomb, and annihilator plasma cannons that need mobile deflector shield relay team to get their plasma projectiles anywhere.

Balance the economies of thees races so every race is viable at at least one game point like early mid or late and don't let the number of units become a cpu benchmark so ppl can play 30v30 games.