Spring RTS Engine

I was always annoyed by the lack of funmaps in spring, so I made one myself: Mearth Risk

Important things first:

• while doing the map, I discovered some bugs in spring. It will most likely crash if you try to run it with 0.80.4 (so wait for next release)
• must be played with BA (thought other *A mods might work as well)

The rules:

• uppon startup, all provinces are distributed equally among the teams
• if you get a province (at start, or later), a LLT will be placed there for you, which is not only dfens, but will also show you who owns a certain province, as they are always visible
• after you enjoyed the awesome LOTR music, you will get income every minute (1 metal / (province * minute))
• click your LLT to buy units for the metal you got (will arrive instantly):
  • flash for 2 metal
  • stumpy for 5
  • bulldog for 30
• to conquer a province, destroy all enemy units inside (including the LLT) and place at least 1 unit close to the nametag (if they weren't already)
• it is advised to play comend, as the LLTs are, in fact, commanders, and if a player looses all his provinces, he will be eradicated
• the no unit wrecks option from BA might be worth a try, as wrecks might clutter up at certain points in huge games
• the first one who finds the 2 teleporters will get the cake

Screenshots:
None, because the map itself is the same like Mearth.

Link:
Jobjol didn't allow me to upload a map, so its on darkstar for now. Would be great if someone could add it to jobjol or the springlobby torrents

I am sorry for the huege size of the map.
Thanks to Beherit for recompiling Mearth for me.

this sounds intruiging

Was this based at all on BA skirmish or from scratch? (Just curious really!)

TheFatController wrote:Was this based at all on BA skirmish or from scratch? (Just curious really!)

Don't know if this was your question, but its basically original Mearth + 3 new LuaRules gadgets (written by myself) and a armllt.fbi where Commander=1 was added.

Will there be core?

And keeping the wrecks is a good idea I'd think, more utility for stumpy and bulldog with shooting over them and crushing them.

I wouldn't stop at 2 factions. You've only got 3 units, so you could make a pile of little 3-unit factions out of existing content.

Hell, you could probably make this into a F/OSS game if you care about that sort of thing just by swapping in some free-content units.

cool idea!
would it be possible to get it to work on every map, like generate the provinces from metalspots similiar to how kernel panic does it?
Because 20x30 is a big map and you need quite some players to fill it. and we all know how hard it is to get players for a new game. if you can chose a suitable map for 1v1, 2v2 it might get much more playtime than if it only works good for 4v4.

Why wouldnt Mearth be suited for 1v1 or 2v2?

knorke wrote:cool idea!
would it be possible to get it to work on every map, like generate the provinces from metalspots similiar to how kernel panic does it?
Because 20x30 is a big map and you need quite some players to fill it. and we all know how hard it is to get players for a new game. if you can chose a suitable map for 1v1, 2v2 it might get much more playtime than if it only works good for 4v4.

Autogeneration could probably be done, but I am in favor of manual placement. Also, I think most of the maps are not suited for risk-like gameplay.

The map choice for mearth was intentional, as you have enought provinces to have some fun. You don't need 16 players to play it, it is fun for almost every setting with more than 2 factions. However, keep in mind diplomacy is an important part of the game, so XvsX isn't as funny as FFA.

Different factions won't happen, because it defeats the intention of the game.

BUT: The lua is really simple, and its written in a way which I hope allows for easy reuse, so please go ahead and make modifications of it.

aha the only reason I mentioned BA skirmish is it was a mutator with a similar theme (get points buy units at a flag).

This is cool tho

Btw how many provinces are there? 1 Province making 1 flash in 2 minutes seems quite small.

JohannesH wrote:Btw how many provinces are there? 1 Province making 1 flash in 2 minutes seems quite small.

31 of them. Making for a total amount of 15 flashes / minutes. Will certainly add some more to it. I also wanted to add like "continents", so that if you have a certain set of provinces, you get special income. Unfortunately, I don't know how to modify the terrain texture to add some borders to it. Maybe someone who knows better could help a bit?

For a moment I thought you combined the height/texture maps of Mearth and Risk.

But anyway, good stuff!

I bet making it turnbased like risk will be hard work to create.

How are the little flash battles fought? is it like on mearth, just luck (dice roll) or are they fought with skill (micro)

ChaosMonkey wrote:I bet making it turnbased like risk will be hard work to create.

How are the little flash battles fought? is it like on mearth, just luck (dice roll) or are they fought with skill (micro)

You buy real units. You will get a real flash, and can do anything you can do in normal BA.

edit: btw, it does run in new spring 0.80.4.1 release