Spring RTS Engine

Well, since time immemorial RTS's have struggled to recreate good hand-to-hand combat. Projectile weaponry is much easier to simulate on a computer.

Thus far, the only games to do it vaguely succesfully is the Total War series. I think this is more or less because it does away with the idea of "hitpoints" (I know it doesn't, but it is far less prevalent). Units don't stand there belting each other with swords until the other falls down, as in the Warcraft series (or practically any other melee RTS for that matter).

I started this thread do discuss different ways for Spring to be able to simulate melee combat, and how to go about doing this.

I know this is relevant, because there have been numerous attempts to get hand to hand combat in OTA, from medieval mods, to american revolution mods (:oops:) to Jedi lightsabers. I'd love to see some succesful hand-to-hand mods from Spring.

In reality, hand to hand combat seems to be made up of two chances, which are not interrelated:
That is, the chance that you score a hit, and the chance that you block the enemy.

Of course, it would be significantly more complicated then that, ranging from being attacked in the back, to having shields, to dodging blades, and so on. You can go further and have all sorts of complicated factors from morale to fatigue.

The most important part of it all is that it has a level of randomness on the small scale, so that a light infantryman actually has a chance of cutting down a horseman (just as a hypothetical example), but on the large scale, a squad of light infantry should succumb to a squad of cavalry.

It is all very complicated, but I think it can be simulated quite well in Spring. And there are so many mods that would be awesome to do in Spring with melee combat...

(While I'm getting excited: Chinese warfare, Japanese Warfare, Ancient civilisation warfare (greeks, romans, egyptians, etc), Lord of the Rings (or other fantasy settings), medieval warfare, renaissance warfare (with muskets and bayonet combat, Star Wars Jedi combat (using something akin to SJ's plasma reflection script for Jedis to redirect laser shots), etc)

How do you think is the best way to tackle Melee combat in Spring?
Remember, it is a fine line which is difficult to approach. Kingdoms, for example, failed rather miserably in melee combat...

Well, there is a MeleeWeapon weapontype in Spring. Theoretically at least.

With Spring being a simulator kinda strategy (no rock/paper/scissors stuff, no random hit/miss, no artificial bonuses), it would be kinda hard to make realistic melee combat. Let's see. A unit could, theoretically, receive some parameters from the projectile that hits it. It could, thus, be able to react to it in different ways. Presuming that the projectile bears some parameters of the unit that sent it (by projectile I mean a melee hit too), some calculations could be made 'on the client side', and a proper effect would be applied. I still don't know how would such a system work, but with some proper tweaking we could make some sort of melee combat, although far from perfect. Spring is too simulator-ish to be able to comprehend large amounts of data for each and every unit.

As for simple hit-block things, that would require a bunch of new unit and weapon tags, but it is, in essense, possible, but with the healthbars.

I don't know a whole lot about how units react to situations with their weapons, but if a unit was extremely mobile (high turnrate/speed) and had a blocking attack and a striking attack..would that go anywhere with the concept of melee?

Could it be rather done whereby the attacking unit fires its melee weapon, and rather than the defending unit deciding what to do with it based on that weapon information, it has a certain algorithm that it must run in order to determine whether to activate its "block" script, which activates something that blocks the enemy (and has animations on both units accordingly). The algorithm would be based on a number of factors, so that having a "general" or "hero" near by would increase the chance of blocking by X%, while being grossly outnumbered would decrease the chance by X%, etc.

The other thing that is more or less necessery when it comes to melee combat is the need to put units into tight formations that respond well, such as Spear units forming a phalanx with spears down at the front, and men rushing to fill gaps, etc...

Something worth mentioning; units need to be able to dodge as well, if they have space to the left, right or back. It adds strategy, because you control how much space is between your units. (i.e. a more compact party of infantry is more powerful than the same party spread out, because of the 'two on one' effect. On the otherhand, units with more space are more powerful, because they have space to manuever)

Also, we need to leave in hitpoints (not just have 1life, 1damage), but make it so that between 1-3 succesful hits kill. That way units are not just hacking retardely at each other. The reason you don't want one hit kill is because in a real battle, most people who are wounded don't die. That means that you need something in the AI like 'if you are below 2/3 health, retreat to the back of the group.'

What you're asking here is a complete overhaul of the existing system. The project's opensource, so you can try coding that in yourself. I have a feeling that the SY have something like that in plans for their future strategy, but it's not going to happen until many other important changes are done.

What we also need therefore are variable damage hit tags, so weapons do different amounts of damage depending on where they hit. This would make ww2 mods and realistic mods more viable, cause a tank dies more easily if you shoot its top than its front armour.