Spring RTS Engine

You can read all about it here: http://evolutionrts.info

Maek Discuss!

!!!1!!!!!!11!1!1!!
nice job! I actually thought you kinda abandoned this after there weren't updates for months and the auto updater failed lol

Oh good this is still in development. Thought it faded into the mists with Crimbo town.

Hehe, very much alive and kicking

Wow, it's so much different from what I've seen a year ago. Good job!

I'm downloading it now, but will try it tomorrow. Does it work well with AIs (esp. RAI)?

hehe I wouldn't say it works "Well" with RAI... good enough maybe? Make sure you disabl;e the scoring modes if you use it with rai. It doesn't know how to use the capture points thingy.

After all its called Evolution RTS

Nice one!

Anyone feel like setting up an autohost?

I played for a number of games today with a few people, and noted a few things that i figured id share

number 1: Nobody plays i had 3 people for a few games, but that was the most really.we found a 4th later, but the other 2 i had went off to sleep (pfft who needs sleep)

Number 2: the AI makes my game crash a lot. It is VERY hard to start a gave with AI players, they seem to crash often. Problems I note: Startpositions are screwed: I believe mountains break your 'base' starting thing, as well as water... starting offmap is also rather bad.
One map that i managed to get the ai to work relatively well was one with only 2 start positions.
All of this was done using RAI...

Number 3: emps are really annoying, and there is no counter. The entire time during one of my games, one of the others was shooting emps as many as he could ... they are rather annoying >.<

number 4: the racial changes arent very clear. everyone can build pretty much the same stuff, just different looks and weapons.


Number 5: Units seem to like to turn aruond and go home. This is especally present in those free little gunships; often i tell them to go someplace and theyd prefer to turn around and go right back to where they were. Sometimes also present in cons, and i cant recall seeing it on my tanks.

Number 6: those silly ammo boxes are both big and kinda immersion breaking. while it is an interesting concept, would it be possible to make them a bit less weird?

And finally:
During my last game 1v1, the game just kinda froze for both of us. music kept looping and everything.
Had to force exit with task manager :\

1. Not real shocking considering people are too busy playing BA. The only way that can be changed is more people like you playing and hosting games. If you truly like the game then that's awesome! Unfortunately I can't always be around to host games (someone making an autohost would kick ass *clears throat loudly and looks around*).

2. Also not real shocking, As I said, RAI "Kind of" works. I've had much of the same problem. It's more of an issue with the AI and spring itself than anything else. I also know why it's crashing, and that is because spring itself doesn't actually support the minibases, which means they actually do use a commander to trigger their spawn, but the "Commander unit" is removed long before you would ever have a chance of seeing it. The AI's sometimes have a little tough time dealing with it. What has worked well for me is to not do anything until the AI's have finished initializing. Also, more than 3 ai's in the game seem to cause it to go a lil funky.

2b. Using default starts prolly isn't the best idea. Mappers have a habit of setting default starts obscenely close to mex spots, and it's a lil annoying to have your factory spawn on a mex spot.

3. Interesting, considering that you can have a maximum of 3 emp silo's and each silo has a 2 minute recharge time before being able to fire another shot. Additionally, considering the time it takes from firing to reach the target, it's interesting that he was able to predict your movements so well, or was he emping your defense lines?

If that's the case, the moral of the story is to not rely so much on defenses. Additionally, the stun time is only 10 seconds, no matter if 3 missiles hit the same place 3 times in a row, the stun time is only 10 seconds (in other words hitting the same spot with multiples simultaneously is jsut wasting them).

If you really wanted to counter them there are several options. The first obvious counter is make your own and stun his silos or, bombing run (protip, use the extremely cheap airscouts to confuse enemy AA), transporting your units into the enemy base (they have 800 hp for a reason), or a combination of any of the above (there are a lot more ways, but these are just some examples).

4. Not the case at all. You should probably play both sides before saying something like that. Did you happen to notice that the terra heavytank has 2800 hp and the explorer heavytank has 4000 hp (upgraded has 8000)? Or the fact that explorers have radar jammers and terra doesnt? Perhaps the fact that explorers can upgrade their units in to extremely heavy versions of themselves?

Terra has no true ballistic arty except the negotiator (and considering it takes nearly 5 minutes to build it's generally not something you see super soon in the game however I did spec a very interesting game last night where it was the first unit out... was rather bizzare actually). Something a lot of people I have seen recently do is play terra and try to stand toe to toe with explorer heavy stuff. There is a reason I said not to do that in the play guide and that reason is because your army will get pwned. There is one way to stand toe to toe with explorers and that is the omega spiders, but just because that SOMETIMES works doesn't make it a real great idea.

Also take not that some of the heavier terra stuff cannot shoot behind itself. Most noteably, the heavytank, the omega spider, and the negotiator. These are important aspects to keep in mind.

BA has fostered some very bad habits in rts players in spring, 1 of which is lack of scouting and, making radar. I don't understand how people can get by in BA even without radar, I mean it makes you totally blind? Additionally radars give 1000 los, which is pretty significant. If you are playing as terra, scouting often is very key, reason being, radar jammers. Explorers have them you don't. Knowing what your enemy is doing is invaluable. Additionally, the airscout is very capable of outmaneuvering missile towers, flak and lightning... not so much, but they are ridiculously cheap.

People tend to read the story and the side differences and want to play terra, but there is a catch. You have to really think when playing terra, cause mid to late game, explorers have you outgunned, outmuscled and probably outdefended, which is when you have to start thinking outside the box. Terra isn't something that really should be played first. For a newbie, they are significantly harder to win with than with explorers, however, once you are familiar with the game and with terra itself, you'll realize that they have some incredibly powerful tactics if used correctly.

Another one of the HUGE mistakes I see people playing terra making, is lack of micro. It seriously makes me cringe when I see someone take a pack of plasma/rocket mechs and jsut send them at the enemy and not actually maneuver them. They are that expensive for a reason. Each volley (from either of them) does 1000 damage, with a very nice range and high maneuverability, and to just see them get wiped out because the player decides not to pay attention warrants ./headdesk.

Long story short, the mobile units on each side are completely different, which is where familiarity comes in. I cannot teach familiarity with a game, that is something that gets learned over time. Evolution is one of the very few RTS games I have ever seen where you rarely see the same thing twice. I have seen some of the weirdest batshit strategies win the game. Sadly, a lot of the time with new players, I see them playing BA, thinking that 8 metal income is enough and they don't need to expand at all. The game is actually VERY complex, you have a massive wealth of tactics available to you. It is up to you to use the tools provided to you.

5. That has absolutely nothing to do with the game and everything to do with either your particular setup or quirks in spring. Are you giving them patrol orders? If so units in spring (particularly aircraft) nearly always go back to their original position before going to the point to where the partol order was issued. It makes no sense to me, but that's the way patrol orders in spring work.

6. The ammoboxes represent a very important and strategic game mechanic. Before I revamped them they were barely visible, also the bigger they are the more you can collect with a con at a single time. Evolution is in no way meant to be realistic. I can understand the immersion factor, but it is impossible to please everyone, and there is always going to be someone saying "Do this or I will never touch it again", it's just kinda the way things are. Now sometimes there are legitimate points behind it, but at the same time, for every 5 people that complain about something there are 5 others that like that particular something. As a matter of fact, while the boxes are quite large, I have gotten an overwhelmingly positive response about them, as such I'm not planning on changing them till some sort of a "Majority Opinion" develops. There are actually a lot of hidden advantages to them being larger, but I don't expect anyone to fully understand that as me and lurker are probably the only ones who know exactly how things work internally.

Last point: That's annoying. Did either of you happen to keep the infolog so that one of the springdevs could run it through a stacktrace and figure out what happened (a replay should, in theory, cause a proper infolog to be generated)?

Last piece of advice: Line up your units. Evolution is as much about micro as it is macro, and if you mob your unit groups you will most likely lose, hands down. Learn which units need to be microed, and learn how to control your groups so that they are the most effective.

Do you hapeen to have the replays from the games you had? I would very much like to see them. Thanks!

Wasnt really expecting more than a few lines per point

1: yea... you guys do get a rather nice page when I start up tasclient though... thats how I found it, so i know its working :p

2: Most of the time the problem happens DURING game start, after everyone has loaded, after the countdown has finished, but before I can actually do anything.
If i can get to the point where I can do something, its usually good.
b: The AI seems to rely on starts... Ive put up games with boxes and the AI starts on MY box, at one of the starts
Its probably more that I dont know enough about how ai in spring works more than a mod problem though

3: Interesting, I never used the things myself (im not one for indirect-weapons like that), so Im not so sure about them.
He was EMPing my defense lines... sometimes my fusions as well. Those things are a tad obvious: Anyone on the map can see them by looking for the white dots on the mini-map. Makes it easy to simply emp them.
I also kinda gave up on the lt's... masses of AA lightning thingies, yes, but usually it was lines of tanks (im talking tons of tanks here >.> ).
The 10sec is nice, but that is still 10sec where his tanks are rolling through my lines om nom nom'ing my stuff.
Also, we were originally under the impression that an EMP denial tower were anti-emps... but those are just emp lightning turrets. rather nice actually...

4: ok i confess, i played explorer much of the time. I tried terran once, and err either didnt like it, or something and changed back to explorer.
my opponent was often playing explorer however, and i really saw little difference between our stuffs.
Also, how do the radar jammers work? I note jammers and radars morph to each other, so I assumed that meant that trying to use them together was stupid and I should just put up one set...
However what you said makes me doubt that. You make it sound like I should instead blanket my base with jammers and put radars on the outskirts...

5: No, it wasnt patrol... sometimes builders when set to builid something would do this. I just give a number of those gunships a move order, and they start going there, but decide it would be more fun to go back home for a cup of tea. They they just sit uselessly.

6: Fair enough, the ammo boxes can stay :p

Lucky for you, the game i talked about was the last game i played for the night: I will throw up a .zip or similar with the replays and the infolog
*gets replays and zips/uploads them* a whole 3mb... nice...
ok I think thats all of them... a number of games crashed as i said, and a few were just me and some bots

Collecting ammo boxes is a bit of a micro frenzy. For Terra increase their box collection radius to just over their reclaim radius so that an area reclaim order is all that's needed to quickly reclaim. Explorers is a bigger problem because they have the choice to reclaim or make gunship, you could increase gunship creation range to remove the massive micro required for them to transform all the gunships and make the transform ability toggelable.

@lancefighter

If you do choose in game with ai's you have to do /cheat /team x and set the bots starts for them, they can't do it on their own.

I'm not sure why you would want to emp a fusion for 10 seconds, that really doesn't make sense to me. The game where you were getting emped to death kinda made me laugh. You had all your tanks in a big mob. If you would have just lined them up you would have had a lot less trouble. Furthermore, I did decide to increase their reloadtime a bit more though.

Blanketing your base with jammers can work against you, because it also jams your own radar as well. It's a good idea to use both tbh, because jam radius is smaller than radar distance by a good amount.

I saw the lowlands crossing game where the gunships refused to move, and puzzled over it for a little bit until I realized something. You gave them an Alt move order near the edge of the map. The engine wont allow move orders outside of the map and therefore canceled the move orders of some. Right click drag is prolly a better idea tbh.

One thing I noticed a lot of was cpu spikes coming from you. Didn't come from any of the other players that I saw, but at times you would spike up to 39 or 40% which is O_O. It seems like you were lagging at times and then your comp would go into oshitmode to keep up with the game simulation. ^^ That could (In theory) cause a crash.

I spent the better part of the morning watching these replays, and one thing I noticed right off was the utter dependance on defenses. I don't think I've ever seen so many Laser Platforms in a game of Evolution. You in particular make defenses more than you made anything else. You do get credit for being one of the few people to realize that making more than one factory was a good idea, but in many cases you conspammed, yet didn't use those cons to expand.

Protip: For point defense, use machinegun turrets. They are a lot cheaper and have a lot of range. Their damage is lower, but they are perfect for smaller stuff.

Protip2: Make tanks. Make all different kinds, and use arty. They have a HUGE range, so it would prolly be a good idea to use it. Explorers are all about crushing their opponent, so making some of the heaviest tanks they have isn't exactly a bad idea. For example in this case, the heaviest tank in the game is on the explorer side, has large range, 12k hp, and shoots 2 missiles (guided) that do 1000 damage each. Compare that to the terra side whose most beefy tank has 3500 hp (and takes long enough to build that I only use them for special occasions, donut64 seemed to love the hell out of them tho haha).

This is war. Some aggression may be required ;p


@google, I've considered widening the radius many times, but if I go too big then it'll be ridiculous. Ideally there would be a permanant ring around the engineers showing radius. I'll see if I can get lurker to make something similar.

@all, I'm probably going to remodel the engineers to be something a bit easier to pick out at a distance and a bit more interesting to watch. Suggestions and/or model submissions greatly appreciated (cause lord knows that I love not having to do something myself ).

bot stuff: Could you go a tad more in depth about that? ive been playing for just a few weeks and havent even used the cheat commands at all

emp stuff:
well for me it was rather annoying considering if he hit the fusions my entire eco would e-stall, stopping my mex's, and slowing down everything else... I believe this took a bit more than 10 seconds to get over
I eventually started lining my tanks up, but i usually just had them rolling out of the factory to their points and sitting there >.<

radars: I figured as much, but thanks for clarifying.. .I will try to use them more effectively now

Gunships: An alt move order? Im not exactly sure what you mean here. Usually I just right click, although sometimes I use the custom formations widget to line them up...
The game where I was EMPd is actually a great example of it: If you can see through the flak, after i got gunships from all of those boxes i sent them all towards his fusions; they got about to the line of flak then decided that idleing right there was a brilliant idea... youd have to have them all selected and holding down shift to see orders, as the flak was kinda in the way of the view :\

laser turrets: part of the reason I did this was because laser turrets shoot farther than they say they do if you use first person view.. You'll note this especially in the 1v1s on small maps; an llt in the middle of the map could effectively shoot everywhere.
Ill keep those machinegun thingies in mind though
Conspam: I like to keep 8ish cons 'on call' in case I need something built immediately.. I am not really a big expander guy, I go about as far as my limit is to defend and then call it quits for most of the game
Most of the time I end up with multiple factories because they are rather cheap, easy to build... and when i need lots of something built quickly, they are there. However, I find that my eco cannot support more than a few at a time (the emp one, I actually did have the eco to run all 7, and it showed in my military power.

tip2: I blame the fact that I dont know much about the units of Evolution for why I didnt use more tanks and such...

and err. Im not very aggressive >.< I lie in wait until I have an army of rather sizeable proportions, then I consider killing stuff.
You see this alot on smaller maps, where I build thuds the entire time, until i have like 30 of them at that point, whatever they have usually isnt enough.

As for what google said, sonar sensors would be a work-around way to do this: No subs in evolution (yet), so that radius is useless anyway

Forboding Angel wrote:@google, I've considered widening the radius many times, but if I go too big then it'll be ridiculous. Ideally there would be a permanant ring around the engineers showing radius. I'll see if I can get lurker to make something similar.

i didn't say anything about wanting a range indicator. My issue is that there is no area command to fast reclaim or convert to gunships (depending on side). Atm to convert a field of reclaimables you need to queue lots of move orders to make sure the cons cover each one.

My solution to this is increase conversion radius so it's larger than reclaim radius. That the area reclaim command could be used to convert because cons would move to reclaim but convert before they get there.

I actually answered all of Lance's thoughts in the lobby, so I won't repeat myself here.

@google, I doubled the radius tonight.

@all: Please go here: http://www.evolutionrts.info/ as I have just posted an update containing the current changelog.

As far as I know, I have addressed every issue that has been brought to me so far. (Also there is a pic of the new Engineers )

Maek discuss!

Unless the convert radius is larger than reclaim radius you haven't addressed my issue. I don't really mind how large the conversion radius is. What I wanted was a way to give lots of cons 1 command that makes them convert all ammo boxes in an area. Increasing convert radius to > reclaim radius is just the easiest way to do this because then area reclaim = area convert.

It's something you'll have to see then, because you aren't understanding how this works.

Perhaps you should pull down the repo so you can try it for yourself.
http://my-svn.assembla.com/svn/evolutionrts

A line order for cons is plenty to get a massive swath of them converted.

But what if I've only got 1 con and want to convert a quarter of the map?

Did you fing someone for autohosting ? I can set up a SPADS autohost for Evolution RTS if you want. I just need to know the lobby logins of users that should have admin access on it, and optionnaly some trusted users.