Spring RTS Engine

Right, I was just doing a little endurance testing. 250 GEM fighters flying around at a very playable 30 FPS. That was just a pimp there. Anyway, I came back to it about 20 minutes later and arrived just in time to see one crash to the ground. I watched as a couple more crashed, too. I selected one fighter and follewed its movement, and lo and behold, when they run into each other, they lose a HP or two. By the time I'd gotten back, they were all with less than 50% health. Should fighters just patrolling an area suffer damage as they do?

I can understand the reasoning, I guess, but I'm not sure it's such a good idea in practice. What do you guys think?

I would vote "It's a bad feature, remove it", but there is no such choice.

Seriously, I want my plane to be able to move and patrol without worrying about them crashing into hills or each others. I should be fighting the enemy, not my own units stupidity. It's not about realism, it's about gameplay!

It's nice to have an engine avoid the "stacking up" effect of TA where 50 hawks could merge into one super hawk firing 50x power missile (until one hawks dies and its fireball splash damage make you lose all fifty hawks at once). But plane should just have something in their code that makes them avoid choosing trajectory that makes them go into each other (I like how easy it is to type that, compared to how difficult it would be to actually code it), plane could bump and repulse each other when really they're getting too close, but plane losing hp because of collision is very bad. When I play Spring, I want to be able to push giant squad of aircraft out of my factory, I want to be able to have airforce that turn the sky black, without having my airforce being depleted to nothing by the time they reach the other side of the map because the pilot are too stupid to fly in formation without crashing into other. Ok, I'm exxagerating, but even, on more reasonable scale, if I have 10 bombers patrolling in tight formation over my base, ready for use, I don't want to find out there's only 1 barely living one when I finally need them one hour later.

So please remove the damage from aircraft collision.

Also, I remember that I used to build Missile Towe on the top of crenel of Azure Rampart, until one day I saw that my own bomber were hitting them which resulted in the loss of both the MT and the Thunder. So not collision with ground units either.

One of the great thing about TA is how the air units were treated, and how good it looked to have squad of level 2 fighters craft patrolling over my base to intercept enemy bombers. Not being able to have plane patrolling in the air without slowly losing them would be terrible.

The only moment I could accept to have plane collision, would be against enemy planes. Because anyway, in an air battle, you're expecting to lose planes. And because it would be cooler to lose your plane because it hit an enemy plane head on during a fierce combat that to lose your plane during a routine patrol.

I remember a discussion about that on the Godevac forum. Or maybe just in a Godevac thread.

I think the air units need better pathfinding that causes them to not crash into each other. But when they do crash into each other, they should take serious amounts of damage. It looks kinda stupid right now when two planes collide and then only take 2 points of damage and fly away like nothing happened.

I also think it could add to gameplay, by making you not patrol your planes in dangerous areas (like around mountains)

Agreed, if the path finding was good enough to prevent air colisions in all but the most extream cases then I wouldn't care about the feature, but you can't punish a player for the game's pathfinding errors.

The pathfinding engine is already so processor intensive. Air collisions aren't so noticable, I'd rather just have the damage removed entirely.

I would like upped damage when colliding with an enemy (near instant kill) but none in friendly collisions. but my opinion doesn't really matter.

Is it possible to remove FREINDLY unit colisikon, but make ENEMY unit collision damage go REALLY REALLY HIGH!

Why? some might wonder....


"RAMMING SPEED!!!!" Is the only good answer....

I agree. Friendly-friendly collision should be damage free for the sake of gameplay. Friendly-enemy collision damage is alright. And for the love of god make construction aircraft not lag so much...

There should be a ram command, just for kicks!

Gnome wrote:I agree. Friendly-friendly collision should be damage free for the sake of gameplay. Friendly-enemy collision damage is alright. And for the love of god make construction aircraft not lag so much...

i always wondered why air con's lagged so much, but unfortunately i cant even find a logical explanation myself (could it be the scripting ?)

Just a wild idea, but maybe the pathfinding engine is behind it. In the numbers in which they're usually used, they are constantly ramming and bumping into one another, moving around and trying to keep their distance. Constant need for CPU when you have a fair number of them.

I'm not saying a ram/kamikaze command would be a bad thing, in the future sometime, but right now I don't think it should be high priority or even a priority at all... distant to-do list thing maybe.

Friendly-enemy collision is just stupid, it would either be inconsequential damage or arbitrary and just... meh meh meh meh meh

Ram-ship idea:

Model: More or less a giant spike with an engine on it

How it works: Does damage by ramming opponents. To get it to ram, the ram-ship has a weapon with a tiny, tiny range. The weapon can only fire in one direction - straight forward - so that the ship will always ram with the spike. Basically, it rams enemy ships because its trying to get them in weapon range. Should have high health and speed, but its own armour class so that all weapons do x2 or so damage to it - this is so that ramming enemy ships does more damage to them than to the ram ship (it stands to reason that they'd design it to do max possible damage whilst recieving the smallest amount possible)

its an unneeded feature for friendly planes to hurt eachother, but I wouldn't mind seeing fighters run into enemy fighters once in a while.

It would be nice if each friendly aircraft stayed some distance X away from all other friendly aircraft as part of its flight behavior. This would solve both the collision problem and the "furball" problem, where large numbers of aircraft told to go to one spot form a large ball of aircraft as opposed to spreading out and landing.

I would much rather remove aircraft friendly colisions. Hopefully it would fix some of the aircraft lag and my nukes wouldn't hit my aircraft anymore.(Yes this actually happened to me) And also would allow my hawks and bombers to patrol without killing each other. Please, I don't like nuking my own aircraft. I'm still waiting for an anti-nuke to hit an aircraft and allow the nuke through.

EDIT: Is an anti-nuke clasified as a weapon or an aircraft, in this case?

Anything that's fired is classified as a weapon.

I still remember when ONE enemy fink on patroll was hit my nuke...

(it was the first time i ever PLAYED Ta Spring!)

lol unlucky
the odds of that happening must be damn low
the problems i had stemmed from aircon swarms going over a nuke launcher...WHILST it was firing >,<

Nah, leave nuke friendly fire in. You could block nukes with peepers in OTA as well, and it was very funny... it shouldn't be removed here either

Yeah no one wants to remove THAT!