Spring RTS Engine

Somebody was able to porc? You either weren't building enough AutoFacs and pumping out the units with Sheep, or something. Whenever somebody porcs... keep the pressure on, don't let them out of their perimeter... and then build some Demons to crack through their defenses, or use SpireRooks and MegaSheep. And remember, when it comes to Air... Wolves die very, very easily to the equivalent number of Archers.

hmmm isnt it ncie we have a new wave of mods designed to encourage antiporcing tactics yet the players go and try porcing and fail miserably......

Actually he didnt fail miserably, thats the problem. But ive realised how good demons are, ill try building a few of them in the future. They can take out Holders so easily its not funny.

Yeah, Demons are meant to be defensive busters. Squares keep lighter units from charging your Demons, and Spires can defend them. Mix in Archers, and you have your slow assault force, which can crush any defense. The trick is keeping the enemy's Knights from destroying the Demons before they arrive- not always easy.

Also... putting 50 Knights in a giant clump and then rushing them and 100 Wolves at a highly-defended spot often works, too

The key to NanoBlobs is to use lower-end units in various nasty combos as "noise" to keep the enemy from being able to divine where your real attacks are coming from... keep his borders scouted... and prevent him from advancing. An expert player is going to want to advance at some point.

Ive tried rushing with knights, but i have trouble keeping them appart from each other, as if they are to close they chain explode really nicely. Wait, make like 10 groups of 5 knighs, move them around, add in a Wait command, then move them in all at once... That could work i guess. Hmm, i think i need to give this another go.

The Knight chain-explode problem's going away in the next version of Spring. Meanwhile, my current build has noselfdamage=1 for just about everything now, it really helps the units do their thing without spontaneously combusting...

Major bug found: Try possessing a MegaSheep. You will see what i mean. Also, when possessing a SpireRook, the aim point is way down low in the grass. Other wise its all looking good to me.

If your interested, ive got a replay of a great 4 way FFA with me and FizWzz and a few randoms. Needless to say i won (my first match basically ever), but you might be interested to just watch it for balance issues or something. Turned into a slug fest of SpeedMetal proportions close to the end. Was quite fun indeed.

I'll try the MegaSheep possession. Truth be told, I don't ever possess the units while playtesting, so I must be missing something there. Same thing with the Spire. My guess is that the issue is with the origin of the camera in the FPS mode... I'll look into that.

Also, dont know if you can fix this, but if you possess a Demon, fire that double weapon thing it has, then re-aim, the small scatter shots follow your aim, instead of staying where the main blast was. Other than that all is fine with possessing I think.

Yeah, the whole Demon thing... that's a feature of Spring, that is kind've a bug in that particular context.

However, fixing it would almost certainly bork up a lot of other mods, so I'm not likely to raise a fuss about it any time soon. While it'd be nice to have some sort've "aimlock" trigger for things using Burst, so that the entire burst would be directed at the original target point, I doubt if it will ever happen, tbh, and it's rarely a big problem. I'll post about it in Feature Suggestions, since it would be nice... but I'm not holding my breath.

As for the MegaSheep and SpireRook... the problem is with Spring's interpretation of where the FPS camera should be. Currently, it's the origin of the hitsphere, which is kind've borked, for anything where the hitsphere isn't well above the ground.

IMO, it should be a third-person point somewhere above and behind the unit, defined by a modder, ala Freelancer, but I haven't gotten around to talking the developers about that possibility, because I've already given them months of work to do, and I feel bad piling even more ideas onto them, even when I think it's a good idea...

Argh, a small feature request: could you make a spawn.txt that makes a bit sense?

If you want I can give you one I made, but it's only suitable for testing purposes I think (that's enough for me (Random enemies is very useful for testing sync) but maybe you want something slightly more balanced )

hmm spawn.txt is a bit outmoded and silly. Have you not tried the latest NTai? I know it may not be perfectly working for OTA style mods but it's always outperformed expectatiosn on nanoblobz, and the very way the nanoblobz buildtree is setup means it should avoid a lot of the pitfalls of the svn build incompatabilities.

It isn't fast enough plus (sorry) I do not fully trust the AI code to not crash the game (no discrimination btw, I use none of the AIs for sync testing ).

As for fast enough, my spawn scripts gets the unit count over 500 in 2 minutes, 2000 in about 5 minutes IIRC (Random Enemies 2 on NanoArenaV2), whereas NTai (SVN trunk version) only got to 50 units in 10 minutes.

Wow, i just had a 30 min match with Tobi, and it was GREAT fun, which really was a happy suprise. You probally know this already but when the demon goes up a slope, it stays horizontal, which looks bad.

Too bad the computer can't really handle 2000 units :)

Yeah, same, it was a great match indeed

And it even was my second great match on one day. I played a game with Krogothe too, which also was great fun!

Nanoblobs is quite cool now as long as your opponent is about the same skill level. (I wolve-rushed some noobs earlier )

Bad thing was the unit count, in the game with Krogothe I got stuck on 500 units (nice thing is that my computer can handle that), but it changes the whole strategy (you can't infinitely keep spamming attack units have to replace sheep with megasheep etc.).

Guess I should go and optimize spring for nanoblobs

E: supersheep->megasheep

Tobi wrote:...

Guess I should go and optimize spring for nanoblobs

+1

Y'know... what I'd like, honestly, is the ability to have a lower unit limit built into the Client and the SPClient, so that you can have games of NanoBlobs that are a little tighter in focus, and don't lag multiple players out too badly, even with the bells and whistles going.

BTW, the next version's almost done The improvements are going to please a lot've people, I hope.

If you're saying what I think you are, you can move the slider to the right, then the left allowing you to go down to a limit of 10 units.

If I find some time I'm going to try low-unit-count nanoblobs.

(The interesting thing is I was already wondering how that would end up even before you posted about it)

AFLobby has both a slider and a spinner control allowing you to manually set it to any arbitrary value...