Spring RTS Engine

1Fac's issues with factory-balance got me thinking about this issue. If you look at the original TA stats:

http://modinfo.adune.nl/index.php?act=m ... ssic_ta_56

you'll see that there is a class of kbots with high slope that includes only 3 units: the Morty, the Flea, and the Thud... which seems to be a completely random selection. Every other bot uses vehicle-like slope tolerances. To me, this implies that Cavedog originally planned to give more kbots a high slope-tolerance, but changed their minds (and made a mistake while doing it).

XTA set a Spring standard by giving Kbots higher slope tolerance, and just about every mod since then has aped this - including EE where it creates a huge balance question since one faction fields bots while the other fields vehicles.

I'm starting to wonder if it isn't differentiation for it's own sake, and doesn't actually produce better gameplay or more diverse gameplay. I mean, many maps are ambiguous at first glance - you look at the slopes and wonder if they're kbot or vehicle viable.

For "regions that only special units can reach" we already have aircraft and vertical-terrain vehicles. Those units have none of the ambiguity of kbot/vehicle slopes.

Meanwhile, it creates a balancing problem - if kbots and vehicles are equivalent, then on a map with bot-slopes there's no reason to pick vehicle. If kbots are less powerful than vehicles, then on a vehicle-friendly map there's no reason to field bots. Either way, we have a monoculture - we have 2 sets of units that will rarely intersect. That's a waste of maintenance time and effort, when you really are making 2 seperate but very similar games when you could be making 1 game that is easier and better to maintain... or 2 smaller games that are actually substantially different.

Obviously there's no reason to rock the boat in older mods that already are settled on this issue... but in newer mods, maybe we should be asking ourselves what this actually gets us? TA was fun without this distinction. Does changing that really get you a better game? I get the impression that Cavedog asked themselves this very same question and decided "no."

I'm not 100% sure but I tend to believe that the way the movedata was done there is wrong. Weren't the maxslopes defined via the maxslope tag in the FBI responsible for the move-related stuff in TA? You'll e.g. see that a Flash has a value of 10 whereas a Peewee has 17 (and those numbers more or less are constant between tanks & K-Bots)...

Concerning the "Is it worth doing such 2 classes or not?": There is no superior solution. Having those two gives you more tactical options and has different requirements towards the maps. There of course may be maps where just one of the classes makes sense but that then isn't a perfectly good map for that concept because it'd need areas for both types on each map maybe with a slightly different tactic in mind...

I also think that it's a "stupid" argument to say "Hey - just doing one slope for everything results in less units and is less work to balance so that's the way to go!". You don't do something like that. You should sit down at first and think of how complex your want your game to be and design it that way. If you say that you don't want people to get their brain all busy with analysing the map to grasp which unit type fits best and in general take a bit of strategy out of the map layout fine - do so. But just dumbing things down because it's "more easy to balance or maintain" is a stupid reason to me...

I'd say the answer to your question depends mostly on the mapset you expect to be used for the game. Ie if you exercise control over the maps that are played/ have a set of maps that is tailored to the game, then why not have differentiation between bots and veh.
If no, then of course you're issues are pretty valid, I'd say.

Edit:
@Athmos: I think you're misunderstanding Google slightly - I think he's saying "do one moveclass - cause then we have practicly twice the number of groundunits that are actually viable for each game" (not "do one moveclass - cause that is half the maintanance effort")

2nd Edit:
Apologies, I mistook Pxtl for Googlefrog :/ .

Well I understood it in a way that he said that there are "2 sets of units" that "rarely intersect" and that this is "a waste of maintenance time and effort" because instead of doing those "2 seperate but very similar games" you would be better of "making 1 game that is easier and better to maintain". Or you do actually "2 smaller games that are actually substantially different"...

So I think he's pretty clear on abandoning one unit set as they to his mind do not differ enough from each other to justify both existing at the same time and half of them simply not getting used (which half depends on the map)...

After his suggestion this whole slope difference between K-Bots and vehicles should be solved by aircrafts which would be responsilbe to get things up terrain with high slopes...

Pxtl wrote:1Fac's issues with factory-balance got me thinking about this issue. If you look at the original TA stats:

http://modinfo.adune.nl/index.php?act=m ... ssic_ta_56

you'll see that there is a class of kbots with high slope that includes only 3 units: the Morty, the Flea, and the Thud... which seems to be a completely random selection. Every other bot uses vehicle-like slope tolerances. To me, this implies that Cavedog originally planned to give more kbots a high slope-tolerance, but changed their minds (and made a mistake while doing it).

XTA set a Spring standard by giving Kbots higher slope tolerance, and just about every mod since then has aped this - including EE where it creates a huge balance question since one faction fields bots while the other fields vehicles.

I'm starting to wonder if it isn't differentiation for it's own sake, and doesn't actually produce better gameplay or more diverse gameplay. I mean, many maps are ambiguous at first glance - you look at the slopes and wonder if they're kbot or vehicle viable.

For "regions that only special units can reach" we already have aircraft and vertical-terrain vehicles. Those units have none of the ambiguity of kbot/vehicle slopes.

Meanwhile, it creates a balancing problem - if kbots and vehicles are equivalent, then on a map with bot-slopes there's no reason to pick vehicle. If kbots are less powerful than vehicles, then on a vehicle-friendly map there's no reason to field bots. Either way, we have a monoculture - we have 2 sets of units that will rarely intersect. That's a waste of maintenance time and effort, when you really are making 2 seperate but very similar games when you could be making 1 game that is easier and better to maintain... or 2 smaller games that are actually substantially different.

Obviously there's no reason to rock the boat in older mods that already are settled on this issue... but in newer mods, maybe we should be asking ourselves what this actually gets us? TA was fun without this distinction. Does changing that really get you a better game? I get the impression that Cavedog asked themselves this very same question and decided "no."

TA balance is pretty bad....
I think TA's fun results from actually having less units available(has a lot less units than BA and even less if you consider only the ones that are actually usuable) while they have all sorts of tricks and require all sorts of fun micro and time to learn them.
TA was fun at the time because it was revolutionary nowdays people who still play TA on a regular basis,play it cause they know it and are used to it,some also play it once in a while out of nostalgia.

Your question,IMO,is a question of how many units should a game have.
In Modern TA mods In Spring each faction has 3 kbot labs and 2 vehicle labs.
On maps with steep hills you play with kbots on flat ones you play with vehicle and on maps with both or with moderately steep hills where vehicles are slowed down but can still move you play both.
Sure a pw and a flash are the same except one is faster and one can climb hills(supposedly) and you could just cut most of these parallel units between kbots and vehicles and only have like 60%-70% of the total unit count but will that give you some advantage over how it is now?It will make the game simpler to learn and easier to maintain but I think that that is about it.
Beyond that its the role of mappers to make maps per game than exploit and allow certain units to be preferable.

I don't think we have diverse enough well balanced maps.
Not enough maps with low slope hills.
Not enough maps with mexes on hills as oppose to being hilly but mexes sitting on flats.
Not enough good and diverse sea maps etc...
Even With BA guardian sucking so much for cost you could theoretically make a map where its better to make a guardian than to tech or make units,just none of the mappers made one.

I won a game once against a veteran player (i suck btw) in Total Annhiilation on Small Divide because he built defenses in the middle and I went over the mountains with thuds and jacked up his mexs.

But yes. Kbots walk. More mobility in the ground contact = more slope tolerance.
IMO it should be small wheeled < small tracks < big wheeled < big tracks < bipod legs < quad legs < spidery things

Edit: center of gravity also plays a role (taller things maybe able to fall over easier, depending on center of gravity)

I think somebody thinks I'm Google_Frog... which makes sense from the frog in my avatar, but I'm not.

But yes, my point is that either way, a single game with a unified unit-space might be more fun than putting vehicles into a subset... regardless of realism and historical conventions of Spring.

In 1faction we're trying to make some Bots good at wreck fighting. Vehicles will become stuck in wrecks due to their turn speed but bots can manoeuvre reasonably easily. This way the terrain can morph through different terrain types as the battle continues.

If you look at Maackeybot most of their units are good for wrecks; Rouge has arced shot, Thug has balistic shot, Roach is harder to hit in wreck, Outlaw has a mass AOE attack with ignores wreck. Only unit left out is Bandit which sak is talking about giving a gauss gun that can shoot through wrecks.

There's also Clogger and terraform to create your own hard to pass terrain.

There is always the issue of different movetypes being OP on certain maps but I think we have balanced them reasonably well within many of Spring's maps. For example I was able to use Recluse in support on Comet in CA, this would indicate that they're OP on pure hill maps but there are very few pure hill maps.

In CA at least bots and vehicles have very different units as well as different slope tolerance. Both are viable on many maps

I dunno if this has been answered yet, but the answer is the fact that TA maps used very low height values (around 100 - 200 I believe). Well, that's only part of the answer, but it's enough to pave the way for thinking it out.

tl;dr, not my post for once. Yes there is a good reason for it but modders should be sure to make it clear and consistent what units have different slope tolerances. I tried to start a discussion on this issue a while ago in the mapping forum, but people area really set in their ways - mappers and modders.

So what I'm doing is, making a new mod which will implement a more intelligent slope tolerance system, and it will rule, and then all'em bitches'll fall into line. Take that.

Yeah, with terraform in CA, you can create your own rough (or smooth) terrain. So its not quite as dictated by map type, though its true there are still bot maps and vehicle maps (But the intersection is much broader).

Its not all wreckfighters with bots though, thats only maackeybots (old core bot). Spherebots have direct-fire weaponry like rocko which are good on flats and use a lot of ballistic weapons which makes them good at holding hills and worse when attacking uphill. Though they also have tick and flea, truly all-terrain options that the maackeybots do not have.

So its about each factory having a wide range of nevertheless unique tactics suited to many environments, so that any one map will require a slightly different playstyle from each factory. Slope tolerance is a part of this, but so is arcing projectiles vs direct fire, ballistic vs spherical or cylinderical ranges, speed, manoeuvrability, and all the special abilities like kazes, shields, cloaking, etc, which are often factory specific.

Caydr wrote:tl;dr, not my post for once. Yes there is a good reason for it but modders should be sure to make it clear and consistent what units have different slope tolerances. I tried to start a discussion on this issue a while ago in the mapping forum, but people area really set in their ways - mappers and modders.

So what I'm doing is, making a new mod which will implement a more intelligent slope tolerance system, and it will rule, and then all'em bitches'll fall into line. Take that.

That's from the same school of lets make everything cost the same so everything is easier to understand for players.
There is no porblem with TA mods and maps ATM.
The only problem is sometimes maps dont mark slopes correctly and it can be,rarely,slightly confusing.
A map like Battle for planet XVII for example.
You can always choose to not play it or accept the fact it has that random element for unit micro.
Calling this a major issue that requires massive attention by both mappers and modders is a big overstatement.

The conclusion is,"create and adjust maps to a specific mod/mods as oppose to adjusting mods to specific maps".

bobthedinosaur wrote:I won a game once against a veteran player (i suck btw) in Total Annhiilation on Small Divide because he built defenses in the middle and I went over the mountains with thuds and jacked up his mexs.

But yes. Kbots walk. More mobility in the ground contact = more slope tolerance.
IMO it should be small wheeled < small tracks < big wheeled < big tracks < bipod legs < quad legs < spidery things

Edit: center of gravity also plays a role (taller things maybe able to fall over easier, depending on center of gravity)

This makes sense to me. Where do hovers go in this?