Spring RTS Engine

Google_Frog wrote:Just make sure you don't end up with players microing their druids half the time to plant enough trees.

Why?

The origional plan for the chickens e economy was that they would build fungus colonies, which would make chicken fungii grow all over, IE, the fungus colonies would make features appear around them. The chicken drones would then go around reclaiming the fungus for energy.

Google_Frog wrote:Just make sure you don't end up with players microing their druids half the time to plant enough trees.

I would never want this of course. If it turned out like that I'd rework it or add some automation. I will probably make it so a Druid that is guarding an Ancient would automatically plant trees nearby.

Google_Frog wrote:Also if a tree gives energy and BP to a factory why bother with both? Just say a tree enables a factory to build things.

It does sound strange, but I want energy to be used to cast spells and perform some other functions. An Elf Mage won't be able to summon X without a good stockup of energy. I also (urp) decided some units will cost energy+iron to build while others would just cost energy. But all true combat units would require iron so to expand you'll need iron, and to get iron you'll need to expand. (For those of you that haven't figured it out, that means metal spots and extractors.)

Google_Frog wrote:If you're making your own resource system you should be redefining resources instead of trying to cram the way springs resources work into your system.

But lua allows me to use the spring resource system more easily. Getting and setting unit generation, spending, team resources all have lua functions ready-made.

too much text not enough pictures.

smoth wrote:too much text not enough pictures.

This is because, upon seeing the UVmap I made for the elf, you would, most probably, kill me.

That said,

That isn't seriously the elf... is it?

It's a placeholder. The elf will receive a walkscript, better UVmap/texture and possibly some model changes before any of you get to play with him.

stop posting huge assed pngs godamnit midknight.

Thatwasn'tmypicture!

Sounds a bit like Master of Magic - the backbone of your army is real units made the old-fashioned way, but mana lets you do the fun stuff.

Energy and buildpower coming only from the same building is boring though. At least if the trees are the most used sources to get them.

JohannesH wrote:Energy and buildpower coming only from the same building is boring though. At least if the trees are the most used sources to get them.

I think the point is that different factions get different ways to get E and BP, and this is merely the Elvish approach to the problem.

Pxtl wrote:

JohannesH wrote:Energy and buildpower coming only from the same building is boring though. At least if the trees are the most used sources to get them.

I think the point is that different factions get different ways to get E and BP, and this is merely the Elvish approach to the problem.

Correct, and I admit it's strange that they come from the same source. Still working on it, suggestions welcome!

MidKnight wrote:Thatwasn'tmypicture!

Yeah it was my picture. You could have converted it to jpg. It's a very silly looking picture but the it shows that the elves can climb trees and hide there and be sneaky. Thanks for ruining the surprise, mk!

we had no idea but now we do.

You said suggestions welcome. Now you're in trouble. My insomnia is only parallelled by my procrastination, and I naturally shiat out game ideas I will never, ever, ever implement.

So, here's a 4-faction concept of unique economies I figured for CA, adapted to CAK. Their uniqueness is more focused on how units and statics are built, since they were designed for CA where the relationship of wind / energy / overdrive kind of fixes things a bit - the original thought was that all factions would have a windgen, solar, a fusion, some kind of metal-patch capping, and overdrive.

1) The Dark Forest
Based on Germanic/Norse mythology. Units are slimes and treemen. New units are accessed by morphing - units can morph up to larger units, but not vice versa. Units are created by budding - no factories, instead units constantly drain E and M until they have enough to reproduce, and then you get a new one. On/Off switch toggles this, and if they die before they reproduce, you get the resources back. So the only unit that can actually _build_ mobile units is your commander - everything else if reached by factoriless morphing and budding. Morph and bud times are universal (about 10 seconds to morph, about 30 to bud) - the difference comes in cost. While there is a tree of morphs, units can jump from the smallest to largest. A little acorn can morph all the way up to Yggdrasil in one step, in the same time it would take to morph to a small unit, but you will metal and E-stall like mad. In short, their mobile-unit buildpower both infinite and limited.

Also, the Dark Forest units have Poison. Similar to CA Fire, Poison does continuing damage... however, poison continues until the unit is dead. It has no time-limit. Poison accumulates, so a unit with only a hint of poison will last for minutes, while a unit that has taken several healthbars worth of poison damage will die in seconds. Poison is immediately removed when a unit reaches 100% health.

5 groups of mobile units:

Small Goo
(immune to impact damage, but not impact displacement)
Acorn - constructor - root unit.
Slime - miniature antiswarmer goo.
Attack Jelly - kamikaze poison pop-up-goo raider, like CA Tick.

Large Goo
Green Man - skirmisher goo. High accuracy, good for picking off raiders and aircraft.
Slug - poisonous light artillery. Very long sight range.

Treemen
Willow - heavy artillery. Can throw small goo over long distances, which provides all-terrain/transport capability to the Dark Forest.
Oak - melee assault

Leaves (fast Flying Units)
Pusteblume - Slow, flying repair/nanotower platform. They heal each other and regen, making them good at recon. Also provide landing-platform for Leradr.
Glasir Leaf - multirole fighter
Leradr Leaf - poison divebomber (can shoot posion at aircraft) - faster and tougher than Glasir, but must refuel on each shot.

Flying Trees
Yggdrasil - a massive, sluggish assault air, similar to the Krow

2) The Barbarians
A faction of humans and giants - a theme of potion-magic in their army. Woad-painted lunatics with big swords.

Econ is similar to OTA, however they have no static turrets. Instead, they rely on static pools of various buffing magic potions. These cauldrons are depletable, and need time to regenerate up to full power, so to build a large defense you need a lot of cauldrons.

Since they've already got status-effects in the form of their defensive buffs, their offensive status-effect is capture-potions. A catapult lobbing jars of capture-potion would be worrisome.

3)The Dead
CA Chickens, expanded, as undead faction. I've got a good idea of how to pad out the Chicken econ out to a full CA-style faction:

Overdrive improves factory build-rate. 5 or 6 different types of factories, each with a short buildlist, but morphing from fac to fac is cheap. A single mobile unit represents metal/energy/buildpower on the go, let's call it a Soul. Souls are the sole output of one of the Factory morphs (call it the Soul Builder factory). You build a Soul and send it to places to spend resources on statics.

Any building of the same price as an Soul can be built by morphing directly. Larger buildings must be accessed by morphing into an Open Grave - more Souls makes the Open Grave bigger, and allows it to morph into a large building. Need Lua so that you can assign a long buildlist to a group of units (and a factory building Souls) and they will take care of the details themselves (X go to position Y, first one to arrive morphs into Open Grave, followers join the Grave until it's big enough to morph into whatever building you needed). Select a single Soul and you see its buildlist as a set of morphs. Select a group of ecos and you see everything that they can build together as buildings. Fly a Soul into a factory and it will sacrifice itself to add X buildpower/metal/energy to that factory's output for 5 seconds.

In this way, you can have factories build large projects - build 1 unit factory and 5 Soul factories, order all the Soul factories to merge into the Unit factory, and all the Souls will run into the Unit factory and boost its buildpower. Souls are air units to avoid the traffic jams that are usually associated with this sort of econ.

If this game includes corpses/reclamation, Souls function as rezbots.

Thus, The Dead's econ maintains similarity to a CA econ - they can move their buildpower around by shunting Souls from one building into another. Unlike Chickens, they can build units that cost more than 1 worker. They get overdrive - you just increase the output from their factories.

For offensive status-alterations, The Dead get stun.

4) The Golems

Golems are inspired by the static/mobile morphing in CA - why not build a whole faction on that premise? Golems have no mobile builders - all Golem units, including buildings, are built at factories in mobile form. Instead, each Golem can morph into a short shopping-list of static units. Your raider Golem morphs into an LLT. The builder Golem morphs into a metal extractor. The raider-resistant energy source (like solar plant) is mobile, and morphs into a static unstable energy+storage unit (like windgen). Instead of all-terrain units, the Golems have land units that morph into air-units. Flying blockade-runners and whatnot.

tl;dr.

Stun as in a fear mechanic causing paralysis or stun as in a poison mechanic causing paralysis? You could have other fear effects bound to the Dead, a la 1944, if necessary.

CarRepairer wrote:Yeah it was my picture. You could have converted it to jpg. It's a very silly looking picture but the it shows that the elves can climb trees and hide there and be sneaky. Thanks for ruining the surprise, mk!

I thought they actually were very small and standing a bit behind the trees You ruined it

@Pxtl: the factions for my mod are ~Golems/Ents/Demons/Undead. None of these are particularly original concepts but it might be better if we didn't all do the same thing, probably because CarRepairer's mod is likely to be better than mine, so unless I have a unique angle I'm worried his will just eclipse it

Obviously I'm in no position to "bags" ("put dibs on") anything, and wouldn't even if I was: I'm happy to alter my plans if somebody else is planning something similar - there are three mods here: they might as well each be distinct in look and feel. I would like to get things straight before I do too more much thinking though.

Could we have a quick "has/hasn't" here? I'll show you what I mean: My mod (working title = "Doomed RTS")'s would be something along these lines:

HAS

• Lots of big explosions.
• Mostly ranged attacks.
• Charged rather than reloaded weapons ("spells").
• Heavy emphasis on upkeep and economic accountability ("spells" cost energy to charge).
• All units are creatures summoned/animated using magic.
• Emphasis on unit personality (see all Blizzard games)
• Asymmetrical balance: 4 unique factions
• Minimalist unit lists for easy pick-up-and-play.

HASN'T

• Living humans of any kind, except the commanders.
• Elves, Dwarves, Orcs or any other high-fantasy races.
• Emphasis on m├¬l├®e, formations, cavalry charges.
• Bows, swords or non-magical weapons of any kind.
• Guns, catapults, steam-engines or non-magical technology of any kind.
• Large numbers of structures and base defences.
• Large numbers of nuanced units.
• Any dedicated naval units (boats).

NB - there should be the same number of elements on both sides, and your "nots" cannot include negative things (ex: "not boring"). Also they should be things that make sense in the context: for example, you wouldn't say of your car design "doesn't have wings".
This is a conceptualisation technique aimed at focusing your design as much as possible on the things that really matter to you!

Might put this on the front of my thread actually... I'm really psyched, I just wish I had more time to work on it

Anyway, let me know what your angle is so there's no conflict: I am well aware that if there is conflict I will lose, so I am happy to change direction

William

bleah. having three fantasy mods in the works at the same time seems a bit ridiculous. im going to help car directly for now because he seems most receptive to my strange ideas and models.

we really could use a bit more co-ordination in terms of shared assets like models and artwork, especially since it takes a significant amount of time to create enough of an art asset base to create a mod... we all have responsibilities IRL, and would like to see a "finished" mod sometime this century; idk... just seems a bit futile to all be racing individually towards what is roughly the same goal.

and thx z for the kind words about the model :D

edit : what i really mean by this... is if you guys can come up with models that can be used in all three projects, or a trade of models and art, i'll work on those. if we can't figure it out, i'll just keep on with C:AK for now.

KaiserJ wrote:bleah. having three fantasy mods in the works at the same time seems a bit ridiculous. im going to help car directly for now because he seems most receptive to my strange ideas and models.

we really could use a bit more co-ordination in terms of shared assets like models and artwork, especially since it takes a significant amount of time to create enough of an art asset base to create a mod... we all have responsibilities IRL, and would like to see a "finished" mod sometime this century; idk... just seems a bit futile to all be racing individually towards what is roughly the same goal.

and thx z for the kind words about the model :D

edit : what i really mean by this... is if you guys can come up with models that can be used in all three projects, or a trade of models and art, i'll work on those. if we can't figure it out, i'll just keep on with C:AK for now.

Honestly this is the best way. I'm learning things I never knew from working on CA for two years. I'm creating my own mod from scratch, and maackey is creating his. Yet somehow we are working in tandem, both learning the ins and outs and helping eachother. If we were both working on one mod, I'd learn the half that I'm working on and he'd learn the half that he's working on. Then neither of us would have the full knowledge of modding that we have gathered thus far. At some point after working on a team for so long, sometimes you want to spread your wings and try flying "solo" and see things you've never seen.

It's a very time consuming hobby but I'm enjoying it. And because the two mods were "born" at the same time we are progressing at the same rate and learning the basic steps at the same time.

And we are sharing resources. Midknight is one resource for both projects and we are exchanging knowledge of lua scripting, I'm getting a couple of models (he already made me a nice tree to look exactly how I wanted) and gave me a great idea for a weapon that I will implement for both our games.

In the end there are ideas I want to implement that wouldn't fit in someone else's game. That's how it was in CA (and I still put some wtf stuff in there). I have to make my own game in order to use all my own ideas. Then the whole community can see and use them too.

CarRepairer wrote:Honestly this is the best way. I'm learning things I never knew from working on CA for two years. I'm creating my own mod from scratch, and maackey is creating his. Yet somehow we are working in tandem, both learning the ins and outs and helping eachother. If we were both working on one mod, I'd learn the half that I'm working on and he'd learn the half that he's working on. Then neither of us would have the full knowledge of modding that we have gathered thus far. At some point after working on a team for so long, sometimes you want to spread your wings and try flying "solo" and see things you've never seen.

It's a very time consuming hobby but I'm enjoying it. And because the two mods were "born" at the same time we are progressing at the same rate and learning the basic steps at the same time.

My thoughts exactly - so exactly that I have nothing to add (well, almost nothing)

It makes me very sad that I can't keep up with the other two projects: maackey has left me far behind from what I've seen so far, and Car's seems to be coming forward in leaps and bounds and has clearly overtaken me even though I started first.
Still, it would be cool to have everyone under a sort of "Spring Fantasy Project" banner, working (as Car said) in tandem towards a common goal, because at the end of the day we all want a Fantasy mod for Spring, we just have different ideas when it comes to how to achieve it.

William