infantry roles in mods

[bobthedinosaur]

im having difficulty trying to envision infantry in spring, rrr how to do it in my mods particularly. it seems to me that spring is a tanks, airplanes, and battleships game and that mods that are trying to create an effective/ realistic infantry type unit can only doing so by making very small tanks with legs (kbots).

so i was wondering if any one else would like to discuss some of their ideas or what they have found that works or doesnt work to make infantry style units/ gameplay?

by infantry i mean, the fighters on the ground that are the main force. all others are simply support for the infantry, how ever in OTA, which spring is roughly emulating in an evolved manner, there really never was such an 'infantry' unit, but only tanks, or tanks with legs.


edit:
for instance in some of the older RTS' such as the dune and CnC series infantry was not effectively on the same scale as vehicles, and dont take full tank damage, but can be ran over and stomped by mechs, ect.. can capture objective and buildings, and build flags in some games; which all in effect shape the game play.

[Argh]

I think that, from a game design standpoint, that infantry are whatever you want them to be. They can be fairly simplistic "walking tanks", or something a lot more sophisticated, depending on what you want to convey to players, and how many burdens you want to add to your project- the tools now exist, through Lua, to do really sophisticated stuff, if you really want to.

My infantry in P.U.R.E. are basically walking tanks that get a bunch of perks and flaws, depending on their state. They can do some stuff nothing else can- but meh, that applies to almost every unit, really. Lua has allowed me to give just about any "spell" I could want to things.

The main thing that I've seen, since I started treating infantry as a unit, and not as individuals, is that I relate to them a bit differently. Seeing them act as a "team" and take orders as a team means that they can get treated, tactically, as a unit, just like IRL. Personally, I think that's the coolest feature about them right now- they aren't just willy-nilly guys, they're a squad. You can move them around as individuals, but I've found while playing that I tend to use them as a squad, and keep them together, which is like how they behave IRL.

[Felix the Cat]

In Spring:1944, infantry is guaranteed a continuing important role in the game by virtue of the fact that it is the only unit capable of destroying Flags, the structures that produce Command (Metal).

Infantry are important throughout the game, but in its current incarnation are of primary importance in the early game, declining as artillery becomes king during the mid-game. We are currently working on reducing the effectiveness of artillery.

Some infantry occupy unique niche roles. Observation infantry give you line of sight, a key resource in S44 for effective long-range fire. Well-microed snipers can take out important targets in the enemy rear. The cloaking ability of infantry allows them to infiltrate through unobserved and undefended infantry areas and launch attacks in unexpected areas; this cloaking ability is unique to infantry. Infantry can launch effective attacks because they are not restricted by the supply system and do not run out of ammo. The British and Soviets both have access to unique infantry classes - the Soviets can build a cloaked Partisan Shack that produces Partisans, weak infantry with low decloak range that can be a great nuisance if the Partisan Shack is located in the enemy rear; the British can build Commandos that can infiltrate into the enemy rear areas, construct Landing Zones which have limited lifetime and produce more Commandos, and the proceed to blow up key enemy buildings by planting C4 explosive charges.

You already knew most of that, of course - but I thought I'd put it out there as an example of how Spring can go beyond the *A paradigm of infantry as walking tanks and have a completely different concept of game balancing.

[KDR_11k]

Well, what is the difference of infantry to you? In C&C they couldn't fire while moving, multiple could occupy one square, they had a different armor type, tanks could drive over them and they go prone to get an armor bonus. Really simple stuff. In CoH infantry appeared in squads and used cover, could be suppressed and retreat, that's a bit harder to do.

[Gota]

I think that that is very superfisual to make soldiers a nessasisty cause only they can bring down flags,its like a noisense u havetanks and u play but u alos need a soldier jsut to take a flag...annoying.
Nobody wants more infantry than tanks or airplanes but infantry is very cheap in wars,all they need is water and food.
people are the cheapest tools of war and of course they are small and can fight in places other stuff cant,like jungles.
For a war game like 1944 IMO youd need more resources than metal and energy.
They do have more but that resource goes for ammo which i think is not fun at all.
The best game design in my opinion is warhammer design where u have a cap on soldeirs and a different cap on tanks,that way u build everything cause you need as much army as you can get.
This gameplay design can be expanded and improved to fit the Spring engine and the fact Spring's mods usually want to have many units fighting.
You can seperate the resources of tanks and soldiers thus making soldiers and tanks independant of each other.
For soldiers food storages can be build to allow the further build of soldiers but make those soldiers require no resources but buildpower.
The food storages will indeed take up resources but u wont have to build many since your soldiers will be dying on the battlefields anyway.
You can also cap the buildpower of soldiers with a radius aroud your soldiers structure that does not allow for another such building to be built too close making territory itself very mportant as well.
Tanks and planes on the other hand can require resources like metal spots to be taken and so on..so what you get is soldiers that you keep building and trying to use them as effecivly as possible while but they dont interfere with tank and airplane production.

[KDR_11k]

Infantry is fielded in real war because tanks alone fail. Infantry is harder to spot and more mobile in difficult terrain making it superior especially in urban combat where a tank won't even notice the soldier with the RPG until it's too late. Vehicles alone cannot secure a city.

Tanks were designed to complement infantry, not replace it. A tank is used when you have to survive enemy fire, especially when crossing enemy terrain. These things are called armor for a reason.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

infantry are also hella lot cheaper than armour

[bobthedinosaur]

what it all boils down to 'irl' is that infantry are the most basic of the military, and that driving each tank and flying each helicopter or plane is a soldier that can fight on the ground in the most natural basis of a battle ground. tanks and planes cant clear buildings or build defences, but they can sure annihilate them.
it just seems that a rts with a 'realistic' feel to the infantry is really hard, especially to make them important. because they are important 'irl', but in ta you can just build abunch of tanks or planes and stomp on them as fodder.

like all units they should have their weakness and strengths, but infantry should (depending on the desire effect of the game) generally be the core of the players forces. im trying to figure out how one could do that?

[KDR_11k]

Sure, helis and tanks can level a city when given enough ammo but so can a nuke. One problem is that a destroyed city will not provide supplies and without supplies it's hard to maintain a ground force.

Why do you keep dragging up TA? TA doesn't have infantry, it has mechs. Mechs are indeed tanks with legs but they aren't infantry.

One way to keep infantry in play is to make them do things tanks cannot or make them effective combat units instead of cannon fodder. Make them vulnerable to some area denial weapons (machineguns, napalm) and there's a need to use tanks for some roles.

[smoth]

I hate how units have to turn in place in order to make directional changes.

[Pxtl]

One game that had an interesting approach to infantry was Battletech. In battletech, infantry were slow, incredibly vulnerable to area-saturation weapons like artillery, and generally thoroughly harmless once detected. However, they were also stealthy in covered terrain, and had utterly terrifying firepower in relation to their cost.

In other words, they were useless in open fields, but functioned as incredibly effective semi-mobile land-mines where there was some cover to work with.

[Erom]

Hmm. An M1 Abrams costs $4.4million or so to manufacture, plus the cost of the crew. How many soldier do you think you could train for that? 100? In most games, you can get at best a handful of soldiers for the price of a tank ($120 for light infantry, $800 for a Titian in Tiberium Sun for example). Maybe the price difference isn't emphasized enough?

But I think the main reason is that games do a poor job of really capturing infantry's flexibility as compared to armor. Infantry should really have dozens of usable weapons (with specific anti-armor and anti-air weapons), be permanently stealth and cloaked (with a fairly large decloak range compared to TA), able to capture structures, lay mines, commandeer unattended vehicles, climb any cliff, disguise themselves, ect ect ect. It gets ridiculous to try to model alll of that in a game.

[manored]

People forget that population is a resource that cannot be immediatly replaced if lost, and so is the most important. Sending loads of people to war instead of tanks sure its cheap, but wouldnt it be more profitable to keep those people at home gathering resources and making tanks? :) The reason infantary is still used in real-life is not because they are efficient fighters, but because they are needed to secure points for supply and repair and to capture cities... if a country wanted to just annihilate other, he would use air bombardement or missile attacks or arti...

This makes it a bit hard to give a role to infantary in our mods, since in most mods you are to just kick the enemys ass :)

[Guessmyname]

S44 have pulled off infantry combat quite well. Something I experimented with in Epic Legions was LOS. The crew of a tank can only see out a viewport, and they cannot hear or easily spot for things like an infantryman in the open can. Thus, infantry have much greater LOS than tanks, making it useful to use the two in tandem.

[smoth]

infantry getting up in buildings and those other tight spots is important when you don't want to bomb the hell out of shit ..

gundam and TA though... we bomb the fuck out of shit. Screw those federatio.... I mean yeah, we blow stuff up.

[manored]

YA, like I said, infantary is only worth using then you want to have the other country in one piece... thats why I dont fear nuclear holocaust :)

[Zpock]

I think the problem is that people lock themselves in on achieving "realism" by setting some variables to "realistic values" while missing the big picture. Like planting a bunch of trees but your forest sucks. For example setting bullets velocity and range to some ridiculously high number but missing the fact that the game doesn't have much in the way of units taking cover to protect themselves and stay out of LOS, and the map is a plain mini glass jar compared to a real battlefield. Or saying that 1 tank = 100infantry based on respective $ costs to produce/train but neglecting the loss of life, political cost of loosing 100 soldiers to 5 etc, that are again of course not modeled in the game.

Blindly staring at individual values and setting them to be "realistic" and hoping that this will produce an end result of the whole system to also be "realistic" and thus also "fun"/"balanced", despite having missed lots of gaping holes. Instead I think one should start from the top and go from questions like, how easily should tanks kill infantry of equal cost, and vice versa? What situational modifiers (like terrain advantages, abilities, synergies etc) do/can I put in? Then setting the individual values to try and achieve this. For example, instead of setting bullets to kill infantry in 1 shot like is deemed "realistic" you would acknowledge that your game lacks glancing hits, injuries, proper accuracy simulation (bullet almost always hits?) and there is no way for the target to use cover etc, so instead you set it to 10 bullets to bake those factors into the final result.

[bobthedinosaur]

One game that had an interesting approach to infantry was Battletech.

the cbt board game correct? and yes i agree if a group of infantry hiding and armed with anti armor weapons can destroy an expensive tank for very cheap, why buy expensive tanks? unless the tanks where good at rolling thru defences ect...

Something I experimented with in Epic Legions was LOS.

thats why i requested los cone limits for a game development feature. would be useful for such

[Warlord Zsinj]

In Star Wars Spring we have taken a similar tact to S44 (which is a similar tact to COH, Z, and even the BF series), in that the only currency for the metal (Territorial control) resource is infantry. Ie: you can only capture territory (metal spots) using infantry.

This works very well in the early game, the difficulty is ensuring that in the mid-late game, once vehicles and other things appear, that infantry don't become the 'chore' that you have to do to take territory. ("oh bollocks, I've wiped the enemy out with my tanks, but I can't capture the territory yet because my infantry are lagging behind somewhere")

The whole point, from our perspective, of giving infantry the most important role in the game was a) because infantry are integral to the star wars universe, and we wanted to reflect this, and b) because we felt that there was no need to abstract construction into metal mining, when it could be far more physically integrated into the combat scheme. (Instead of making territory important because you need to mine resources, territory is important purely because it is territory. Makes the reward for battlefield success far more dynamic).

I don't think we have 100% achieved avoiding obsoletion of infantry in the mid/late game yet, so I can't really advise exactly how to do it. My current approach is to ensure that infantry are always the most cost effective way of delivering damage. Tanks and other things fill niche roles, such as armour, speed, range, 'high impact damage', etc - but for pure Damage per second per expenditure of resources, infantry are always at the apex, meaning that the most economically efficient army will always contain infantry.

Obviously there are other dependencies that arise, but that's the main line of argument I'm looking into at the moment.

[KingRaptor]

One commercial RTS that I felt did infantry such that they were both realistic and effective (as well as unique) was Act of War. The things that made them particularly effective (some of which were already mentioned elsewhere in this thread, or are already in use in such games as S:44):

1) Despite their massively higher DPS per cost, infantry cannot hope to defeat vehicles in a straight fight. However, they can use the terrain to their advantage : in addition to garrisoning buildings, they can also take cover behind various objects for greater firepower and concealment. They can also go prone, which makes them hard as hell to find and is perfect for ambushing.

2) All infantry can be trained at the barracks (assuming you have the prerequisites), which is cheap to plop down everywhere. In contrast, vehicle depots are much more expensive, and you need two to get the full selection of vehicles.

3) Infantry are the only way to loot banks (a useful secondary source of non-renewable income) and capture POWs (the only source of renewable income).

4) There are plenty of infantry transports, so speed isn't a problem.

5) The only way for vehicles to remove infantry from a building is to level it, whereas enemy infantry can rush the building to clear it in room-to-room fighting, or snipe the defenders.

6) Infantry have huge 360-degree LOS, tanks are often blind as bats.

Hmm...2, 3 and 4 are all in S44. 1 and 5...*feature request for garrisonable buildings and features as cover*