Spring RTS Engine

I'm thinking it would be a good idea to put together some tutorial missions for newbies to play through to understand the mod, the interface, and some basics tacs/strats.

I think an offline tutorial is better than just an ingame help system because I presume it would be frustrating for players to try to immediately learn to play the game in multiplayer battles.

Scenarios would be done using the mission editor + preferably some sort of narration framework, etc.

For starters, it should go through the built-in UI system, key bindings, menus, lua widget management, commandline, etc. Then, basics of *A (metal and energy, solars mex, etc.) And progressing from there, unit management, use of widgets, blah blah blah.

After that, go into some subtleties about tactics. Nothing too fancy like metal maker econ or comteching, but basics like the properties of different weapon types, micromanagement, scouting, assisting, reclaiming, etc. Stuff that is useful under any situation for any player.

Finally, show some advanced strategies, ie expansion vs. econteching, combombing/napping technique and prevention, raiding technique and prevention, late game economy, etc etc.

Supplementary material could be some interesting replays with narration to point out rights and wrongs and lulz.

I think if we make an honest effort to help out people new to the game, we'll retain a happier and more skillful playerbase, and everyone will be able to play more enjoyable matches.

i had some ideas for challanges/tutorials, e.g. dgun a krog/two krogs/three krogs in a row or kill a golly with a flash swarm/3 flashes/2 flashes/1 flash, etc. never got around to doing any of these, though.

imbaczek wrote:i had some ideas for challanges/tutorials, e.g. dgun a krog/two krogs/three krogs in a row or kill a golly with a flash swarm/3 flashes/2 flashes/1 flash, etc. never got around to doing any of these, though.

I thought we already had that stuff, with krog throw and all. :D

But yeah, stuff like dgun use should be explained in detail. In fact, commander use should be tutored in detail.

Question is, how detailed should things go? It doesn't seem very logical to create purely instructive scenario for every unit that requires extra micro. I feel like that sort of stuff should be tied into an actual campaign for players to actually be interested.

(some) people like challanges, if you start giving out medals for beating them under a certain time or by doing additional secondary objectives, they'll play it. bonus points for uploading score ^^

imbaczek wrote:(some) people like challanges, if you start giving out medals for beating them under a certain time or by doing additional secondary objectives, they'll play it. bonus points for uploading score ^^

That's not a bad idea! I wish the lobby system would support something like this.

Be careful - too much front-matter might just scare off the newbs. Look at commercial games - the good ones get you blowing stuff up in the very second task. I wouldn't touch most of the keybinds until after the player has gotten the chance to rape some metal extractors.

Start with "here's how to command some units" focusing on selection and combat. Most of that can be done with the mouse and the shift-key, and exploring the standing-orders buttons on the left-hand-side. It's all self-explanatory stuff. That will get the players excited before you bog them down with econ.

I think Singleplay should be encouraged for spring, as, that's where a newb could actually rape, rather then be discouraged in a multiplayer game.

Of course, implementing a nice immersive campaign would be nice, Im sure doing voiceovers, and, things like that won't be too hard to do. After all it can be done in relatively simple C++ scripting.

ive thought of the perfect BA tutorial

you start with your commander, in the very center of the map
Charge of the valkyries starts to play.
after 20 seconds, an endless spiral of atlas' are spawned outside the map, all with orders to load your commander
????
skills

isnt the main problem with this, that these missions would have to be updated whenever there is a new version of BA?

I'm hoping to create a 'BA Tutorial' mutator which would just include t1 kbots, vehicles, llt's and HLT's and not much else then people could learn to effectively pwn enemy AI's with flash tanks and stumpies and automatically become good players in real BA.

It could even have something like bonus units like "you have 2 bombers!" or "you can place 1 dragons maw!" so people can see the situational use of some of the stranger units.

I thought someone is planning to make a Campaign/Mission SDK by using Lua?