Spring RTS Engine

ehh screwit

I doubt he will add it, we tried several times with OTA AA. Reason being is with having an anti air unit in the adv kbot labs you dont have to invest in other build trees therefore less variety in games. And as much as you dont like it, its true.

And with regard to lvl 1 units I find them great for one thing. Getting killed. Yep thats right folks, their wreckages are a pain in the ass to anybody hoping to carry out a swift deep penetration assault. Sending endless streams of lvl 1 cannon fodder can slow down powerful lvl 2 assaults (I said slow down not stop).

Caydr wrote:I'm going to check into moho geos and see if i can trigger this script error you mentioned. Any idea whether it might've been arm or core?

Sometimes when massive crow attacks are bombing my base spring throws some script error warnings about the crow script. Anybody else noticed this ?

Min3mat wrote:WTF?
the com is too WEAK in AA???

he has a ownage laser to stop rushes of weak units and has a one shot kill dgun...what do u want? a anni laser? a dgun which is 3x as wide???

Umm...you guys should read what I wrote twice and stop putting words in my mouth.

What I showed you was what other ppl did and my opinions on it and what I suggested was a slight increase in his laser str to like 100-125 damage a hit and a slight range increase in addition to a slight movement speed increase...which isn't a huge buff from what he does now. His laser does what? Like 80 now? It still wouuld take 4 hits to kill a peewee. Even with uber peewee micro you can still avoid comm hits.

I also said no buff to hp or dgun. And I agreed that with cloak + dgun + nanoshield, u still have a kick ass one-hitter.



Anyway, as for the peewee/ak situation. I think the ak's and peewees are fine, they are NOT useless. The only problem I see with them is that if you kill one of them, the others around it almost die due to the explosion of the one that was destroyed. I usually aim for the inner ak's cuz if you kill that one and damage the ones surrounding it, the chain explosion will pretty much kill them all. If that could be changed so the explosion does almost no damage to the others, that would increase its usefulness by whole lot. That way, 5 thuds wont own like 15 ak's or peewees.

Peewee's do more damage than AK's, but AK's are faster. AK's are also better at shooting and running and peewees suck at that, which is why ak's almost always own a peewee unless the ak is just standing still. With micro, these things can rush the crap out of you. I suggest other ways of balancing than buffing these units. I still believe that the flash/gator are the superior rushing unit compared to peewee/ak's and if you buff the ak's and peewees too much, you'll take away the flash's/gator's claim to fame (and kinda lower their usefulness).

I think their HP and metal cost are fine. Its roughly about 1/3 the cost of a flash/gator and < 1/2 the hp. To me, thats pretty balanced. Buffing the peewee/ak would pretty much guarantee kbot starts and not vehicle ones. I love vehicles and I love the flash, but if peewee's and ak's get better, I will prob never use the flash again, unless a special need comes.

"i dont think that the com is underpowered"
"the com should be given a (slight) buff"
right...
that makes as much sense as a square planet

Wow, you really haven't got anything constructive to do don't u? Not like I give a rip what you think anyway.



Back to AA....

Since 1.35, I have been having some random crashes in AA. I would either blue screen, spring would freeze completely, or spring would just crash. I have no idea what is causing it but it seems to only happen to me when I Play AA. FF works fine. I wish I could offer more info but I have none. Seems to happen after a certain time in game, I would say 15+ mins. No error msges what so ever. I have yet to play a whole AA game w/o crashing

I've never seen those Krow warnings. If you happen to get one, please send me your infolog and I'll see what I can do to get it fixed: altor@rogers.com

Hmmm... this is the first I've heard of any crashes to do with 1.35 (aside from the moho geo, which isn't confirmed yet and you'd be one hell of a player to have running at 15 minutes)...

Ummm... I'm really not sure what to ask... hm... this is a longshot, but do you suppose your computer might be overheating? Don't laugh - one other guy I know, Sabin, reported his computer was crashing with AA but not FF or any other mods - he blew out some dust from inside his case and left the side off, and hasn't crashed since. It sounds crazy to me, but this guy does know a thing or two about computers and he's not an idiot.

...... alright you can laugh now.

Back to the topic of rocko/storm/thud/hammer balance. I'd like these units to be more different from each other, for them to each have distinct roles. Now, rockos/storms are real good if there's no blocking terrain or features, and thuds are better in the opposite conditions, but is that enough difference? I am really, really opposed to making thuds/hammers artillery units (and btw, their description has never contained the word "artillery" in AA), but I'd like them to be more different from each other.

Changing their HP is out - it's pretty much where it should be, IMO.
Changing their damage is a possibility...
Changing their speed is a possibility...

I think that really the issue here is that they're basically the same unit, just one has one kind of crutch (damage) whereas the other has another crutch (blocking terrain/debris).

I'm trying to decide if this post has any point...

am i the only one who thinks bad man is talking shit? guess so.

If I made a hotfix for the missing scripts in 1.35-F, would anyone download it? I mean, I could make the patch easily, but the last time I made a small patch like this (it's be like 5 KB), nobody even bothered to get it. Should I make a patch or just wait for a new version.

Min3mat wrote:am i the only one who thinks bad man is talking shit? guess so.

Like I said, think what you want. I'm trying to offer criticism and options here, not just spam the board. People have their opinions and I respect that. What I dislike are ppl who don't fully read my post, and they see one thing and just flame it w/o reading it all the way through.



But back to the situation.

Caydr, I thought so as well. I turned off my OC I had on my vid card, installed the new DX (new one came out dec2005 for those of you who haven't upgraded) and installed latest vid card drivers. I can try cleaning my case and turning off my OC I have on my cpu as well. I'll keep this problem updated.

PS: It crashed during FF too, I am doing a complete uninstall and reinstall of spring w/a complete folder wipe (minus deleting maps and mods)

BadMan wrote:

Min3mat wrote:am i the only one who thinks bad man is talking shit? guess so.

Like I said, think what you want. I'm trying to offer criticism and options here, not just spam the board. People have their opinions and I respect that. What I dislike are ppl who don't fully read my post, and they see one thing and just flame it w/o reading it all the way through.



But back to the situation.

Caydr, I thought so as well. I turned off my OC I had on my vid card, installed the new DX (new one came out dec2005 for those of you who haven't upgraded) and installed latest vid card drivers. I can try cleaning my case and turning off my OC I have on my cpu as well. I'll keep this problem updated.

PS: It crashed during FF too, I am doing a complete uninstall and reinstall of spring w/a complete folder wipe (minus deleting maps and mods)

Badman you should think very wisely before requesting power rates to units and stuff like that, just because u get(might) owned by the current units/powers display it doesnt mean its unbalanced.
And therefore trust me commander in aa IS NOT underpowered or weak in anyway.
i can still remember the stories(loads) of the uber overpowered commander till i heard this one! lol ..

Just blow the dust out of your CPU heatsink man. Your CPU is overheating.

I think what aa really needs are the level 3 airplanes.... where in context, bombers actually can bomb and fighters own the sky and gunships are okay...

AKs own as rushing units. Really, they dominate. No good for taking out large structures, but for crippling an economy, (and I was playing kbot only, to prove to a friend that they were useful) they rocked. Two of them running past a bunch of windgens and mexes wiped out all his resources in a hurry.

Yeah, you won't be taking down an HLT with them (well, maybe if you have a few hundred <_<), but they can outrun a defending comm, so some micro can allow AKs to do some serious damage.

Commander (Arm, at least) seems fine to me. The laser is only really good for early swarms, and it takes out AKs in two shots. Fleas in one. Its fine for swarm control...and if you're trying to stop a large tank rush with your commander, and don't have enough energy to dgun, you've got bigger issues.

Edit:

Noruas wrote:I think what aa really needs are the level 3 airplanes.... where in context, bombers actually can bomb and fighters own the sky and gunships are okay...

Er, what? Bombers are already fine. Plenty strong..although the bombing ability of level one compared to level two is maybe a little too similar, they're certainly potent weapons. As for fighters, I haven't used adv. fighters all that often, but the Freedom Fighter (arm level 1) seems well balenced to me. Drops bombers easily, gunships without too much difficulty, gets owned by anti air. As for gunships, I haven't played with the adv. ones, but the level one gunships for both sides are fine...maybe just a HAIR too powerful, but if there's any problem there, its a damn small one. I mean || that small. No real issue, but without fighters or large numbers of anti air, 5+ level one gunships will hurt a lot. I think I'm imagining that though, because I recall a few crashers knocking down a bunch of gunships easily enough.


Yay for marathon balance posts.

I agree
Infantry and hammers/thuds are good as it is, a peewee only costs 45 metal and 897 energy and are pretty fast, hammers cost 121 metal and 1231 energy while being fairly slow. Also, when you pay more for one unit you should get more than lower units for the same price. So it makes sense that infantry can't win against most oponents. But they're good for raids and overwhelming a commander/annihilator.

Infantry kbots will be buffed a bit in the next version. I don't really want to get into the technicalities, but the long of the short of it is, I made compromises during the porting process which has resulted in them being far weaker against LLTs than they ought to be. Granted LLTs are supposed to counter them without too much difficulty, but not to quite the degree they do now.

BTW everyone, I'm attempting a positively massive map render starting tonight. A 28x14, and unlike Altored Divide I'm rendering this at full-size for maximum quality. Altored Divide, which was rendered at 5120x5120 resolution, took 18.5 hours to complete... This new one is being rendered at 14336x7168. According to my calculations, that will require 3 days to render. Pray it turns out good on the first try!!!! Anyway, this means I won't be able to answer email or PMs in the meantime.

You better have heeded my warnings.

That might be a little tricky, since you never told me what they were. In any case, the render must've crashed halfway through the night or something, or maybe there was a power failure, because there's no sign of it. I'll have to try again starting tonight.

Caydr, before you start rendering some things you should know.

The smaller your heightmap the better it will tile. It will render much faster too.

Set your rendering program process priority to low so that you can still use your comp and your render will be done, when it's done. Also, if the file size is above 600 mb mapconv will crash.

I played a few rounds of this last night, and outside of one player throwing a fit mid game I had a great time.

I do want to know, did you reduce the number of units? I seem to remember more units in ota. Also alot of units seem to function VERY differently. Not a bad thing but a bit vexing.

More variety in air units would be good.