Spring RTS Engine

In this thread, we will be discussing the exercise of tactics and strategies that, while not breaking, or even bending any of the core rules of TA, or cheating in any way, are still found to be objectionable by many of the playing public - more indicators of societal norms than of any absolutes. It should also be noted that, while this subject has many fervent supporters with high-running emotions on both sides, this analysis shall be undertaken with the strictest adherence to deductive logic in the scientific spirit.

The term "lame tactic" is generally applied to any tactic that a poor sport loses to. In their turns, Nukes, Krogoths, and even Flash Tanks have been labelled "lame."

One of the most unique aspects of TA as a RTS is the wide array of victory paths. One of the not so unique aspects is a variance in player skill levels. As the two, combined with "huwt feewings" can combine for a large degree of unpleasantness, let's examine some of the more popular "lame" victory approaches, and their counters (using AA1.44 as the default mod, it being the most popular at present).

Krogoths - These Behemoths have pwned many a n00b, and when Core Contingency came out, were the subjects of much whining by noisy Arm players. Weighing in at something like 44,000 metal, they bloody well oughta pwn! Is there anyone present that can't kill a Krogothe with 400 Flash Tanks? In TA, it took closer to 50. Comparably, 20 Bralwers, 7 Nuke Mines, 5 Annihilators (or fewer), an Armored Transport, or a D-gun can kill them given even slight competence on the parts of their wielders. Final verdict: Not Lame, Unless You Suck.

Nukes - Given an expensive facility, slow build times and high energy costs, these much maligned strategic attackers can be countered by facilities that cost much less with weapons that cost less. Then can also be flat-out destroyed rather easily for the investment, and can even hit planes passing overhead while launching, which destroys their own users! Final Verdict: Not Lame, Unless You Suck, Except For The Part About Their Hitting Their Own Planes.

Flash Tanks / Zippers / Brawlers / Thuds / AKs / Peewees / Catapults / Any Other Units that gives you comparably more for your metal investments than similar units - Caydr has rebalanced AA at least 44 times over these units, and will probably rebalance it another 50 before he decides that it's not worth the effort or murders somebody. Even TA had units that weren't perfectly balanced - every RTS beyond the level of Timed Tic Tac Toe does. Final Verdict: Would Be Lame, Except Non-N00bs All Know What These Are, and Can Still Counter The Bloody Things With Each Other, Or With Superior Use Of Commanders And/Or Static Defenses.

Commnapping: Given that each Atlas built costs as much as 3 AKs (which are quite effective as raiders), that they can only pick up stationary Comms, that they have radar signatures, that they die ~very~ easily to a Comm's laser, despite being aircraft and that they chain explode, making swarms little short of suicidal.... Final Verdict: Not Lame, Unless You're Too Fething Dumb To Watch Your Radar Screen, Or Worse, Too Fething Stupid To Build Radar To Begin With. Honestly, if you have more than two stripes and let this happen to without having an opponent surround you and block your pathing with ground units that're mystically enchanted to make your comm only fire at them instead of the transports, then you need to make a new account and abandon your old one - you don't fething deserve more than two stripes. While you're at it, be sure to forget to Ctrl D your Comm so that the enemy can fly him into your allies, making you 1337er, somehow. Also, be sure to pause to D-gun lots in a laggy game when a transport is coming for you - this will make you 1337erer still.

Comm Rushing/Ground Variant - Walk into the other guy's base and D-gun his 700 metal factory, his 50 metal mexs and Windmills, and maybe an 80 metal LLT on the way. Sure, you possibly lose your (estimated value) 28,000 metal Comm in the process, and you spend so long walking that you've likely built nothing yourself, but you'll get to have everyone hate you for being a Comm Rusher because they were too fething, overwhelmingly, blindingly stupid to see your slow-arse Comm coming on radar from a mile off and build 3 LLTs to stop him. THREE, FETHING, LLTs! Final Verdict: If You Find This To Be Lame, Then You Deserve To Have This Happen To You. Twice. While Your Mom Is Watching.

Comm Rushing/Air Variant - Much faster than the ground variant of Comm Rushing, the air variant allows you to travel at the speed of thought, bypassing all anti-air defenses, and magically summons HLTs to defend your crappy air factory from the 1 AK it'd take to kill it. This devastating tactic can be defeated with radar (detecting a theme, here?), 1 50 metal Pulverizer anywhere between your Comm and the rusher's, and any proclivity whatsoever to see a Comm rushing and actually walk the other way instead of standing there, helpess in the face of the player who took his 28,000 metal cureall unit and turned it into a pinata with wings! Final Verdict: If Used Properly, Much As With Any Rushing Tactic, This Tactic Makes Dull Games Where People Just Sit And Porc Until Other Players Take The Time To Finish Them Livelier (much as the hated using AKs to raid tactic that makes lazy players actually do something outside of the fething lame build patterns that they once watched someone with one stripe more than they had use to pwn them), And Blessedly Shorter. God Bless All Who Use This Tactic And Get Away With It.

What I find to be "lame" are people who lose (as we all do roughly half of the time unless we only play in rigged games - 1337!) and then throw hissy fits about how they were gyped, or cheated, by X tactic (which is lame) because they were so awesomely, unimaginably 1337 that they couldn't possibly have lost outside of the realm of foul play. I am lame like this on occassion. I suck. Don't be like me.

For the blessed few who remember the way that TA was designed, the spirit of it, gg. Hope to see you soon.

And taunt you when you lose, because I'm cool like that.

This equals truth!

When did you start using the word "fething"? Personally I find it a really lame word.

Anyways, here's a few more to consider. Players who pause the game when they have a scout over your base or a few dozen brawlies just encountering your AA defence and use the time to orchistrate acts of brawlie micro that would be compleatly impossible in any other situation. Alot of complaints about "lame strats" come from people who wern't anticipating a certain strat and ended up paying for it. That being said, I still think using non in game mechanics, like the ability to share units or the pause features are things that need to be dealt with in the game, as it isn't fair to expect mod makers to balance around them and it isn't fair to allow players to use them to gain an advantage in most situations.

It all depends on your viewpoint of why you, personally play Spring.

I play Spring to have fun. I find that my fun playing Spring is diminished by the use of certain "lame tactics", as you call them: namely, commnapping and commbombing. When I, my allies, or my opponents used these "lame tactics", the enjoyment value of the game as a whole immediately decreases.

To me, the enjoyment factor of a game is in no way related to whether I win or not. Many - nay, most - of my most enjoyable game moments have been when I am losing the game and on the defensive. I've had games that I won that I found plain unenjoyable, due to my allies' use of "lame tactics"; I've had many, many games that I lost that I found very enjoyable, because nobody used "lame tactics".

[For the idiots/Tireds of the world: that last paragraph means that you will be wrong with your accusations of "lol you are sore loser".]

I guess there are lots of Spring players out there who play to win; rather, there are lots of Spring players to whom the only conception of "fun" is receiving the "You won the game" screen. I find that the leet/pr0 players that seem to populate this forum primarily fall into this category. To these players, it's win at any cost and screw the rest of you because I can do whatever I want as long as I win.

Now, there is no intrinsic problem with those players. The problems begin when the "win at all costs" players meet the "fun at all costs" players in battle. The "fun at all costs" players tend to get annoyed at the "win at all costs" players for using "lame tactics" that spoil the game for (in the perceptions of the "fun at all costs" players) everyone; the "win at all costs" players tend to get annoyed at the "fun at all costs" players in return for "throwing a hissy fit".

The first step to solving a problem is recognizing the problem. In recognizing the problem, players should a) realize that people of the opposite type are out there playing, and b) realize that the people of the opposite type are just as entitled as they are to have fun. Now that we've recognized the problem, we can try to solve it. One solution that seems to work is what I call "active hosting". The host of a game is naturally the sole owner of that game; the host is God within his own game. The host should actively define what constitutes acceptable behavior within his own game. Is comm bombing in or out? Commnapping? Comm rushing? Of course, some of this can be controlled through comm ends/comm continues and dgun limits. However, it's always good to explicitly state the rules. In return, players should assent to the rules or leave before the game begins.

I would rather like to see toggles of some sort that would allow hosts to effectively set the rules in a concete way that prevents undesired behaviors. Something like a "No enemy commander transporting" checkbox to disable commnapping, "no commander explosion" to disable comm bombing... we already have "limit dgun" to disable comm rushing, those are only its logical extensions.

One other note on "lame tactics": I don't really see how the first 3 (Krogoths, nukes, and what I'll label "unbalanced units" for the sake of being concise) could reasonably be considered "lame". These "tactics" use the involved units in exactly the ways they are intended to be used. On the other hand, the commander "lame tactics" (commbomb/comm rush/commnapping) use commanders and transports in ways that they are (rather obviously, in my opinion) not intended to be used.

Finally, a note on the different types of player. There are obviously more than the "fun at any cost" and "win at any costs" types. There are the "I like to insult and annoy people" players, whom I will dub "Tired"s in honor of their founding member/reigning king; the "leet" players, who aren't necessarily good, but they're better than you; and finally, the "I like to whine and bitch about what everyone else does" players, who could probably be called "Felix"es!

Oh... since you mentioned "History" here.

The Classic "Lamest" Tactic Ever:

Brawler "Rushing":

Basically, com builds enough resource gatherers to build an airbase, then builds the airbase and set's it to build conplanes, con plane number 1 starts building advairbase while first factory is set on repeat and set to guard the advair base. airbase is programmed to build 50 adv con planes set to guard their own factory and then 50 brawlers or rapiers(who need to be given a patrol route around the base). once the programming is done the player takes his com and or pulls of the occational conplane to start a good infrastructur and continues till he has build the 50 rapiers or brawlers and moves off to decimate all of his enemies...

There are refinements to this strategy that include first tecking up to farks and then going air with farks guarding... or building metal and energy storage and a signifigant infrastructure with level 1 planes before jumping to lvl 2s...

Counters Include:
- peewee rushing because the enemy is too busy teching to bother building defenses (won't work if you wait long enough for him to build his first brawler/rapier)
- building signifigant air defenses because the enemy is too busy teching to bother rushing you
- building 100 cheap lvl 1 fighters
- nuking/combombing his airbase

Fortunately this tactic works a lot less often in spring, and specifically XTA and AA because people whined about it so much and it got "fixed"... but the reason I mention it is that if you acctually manage to somehow send your 50 gunships in and kill your enemies com while it's in the middle of his base and destroy all his pretty toys along the way and have the next 50 gunships ready and on there way by the time you do... your opponent is going to cry "lame" on you.

Good to hear someone speak up about this.

I particularly agree with this bit:

Flash Tanks / Zippers / Brawlers / Thuds / AKs / Peewees / Catapults / Any Other Units that gives you comparably more for your metal investments than similar units - Caydr has rebalanced AA at least 44 times over these units, and will probably rebalance it another 50 before he decides that it's not worth the effort or murders somebody. Even TA had units that weren't perfectly balanced - every RTS beyond the level of Timed Tic Tac Toe does.

Many, many people seem to not understand this. And what is worse, apart from expecting a new iteration of a certain mod every time someone works out that something might be a bit unbalanced (rather than spending their time trying to defeat it, or use it), some people actually start advocating we return to the original Tic Tac Toe gamestyle.

I find it lame when other players dgun large bulldog forces I've massed to push through thier defencive lines with a comm that they're using as a front line defencive pushed into my side of the map. Therefore when I find a player who's done such a thing, I bomb the living hell out of him and decimate his entire front line defence with the combined explosions of both his comm and my comm, leaving the path clear to bulldog plough into his base which is an eventuality I deserved in the first place by building up a bulldog force that could destroy his front line defences and overal preforming more effectively from a macro.

If using your comm as a an offencive defence specialist is an acceptable stratigy then losing your front line because you failed to protect it from all possible offencives is equally acceptable. I'd be shocked and amazed if a player I was opposing didn't do the same thing to me in the same situation.

i think this is a pretty lame tactic:

playing blue planet as arm on 3 player FFA, destroying one of the oponents and severely cripling the other with ships, eventually finding a small underwater base as the last thing left the last guy has left. Being torpedo'd to hell and finding out NONE of my 20 or so subs can actually fire, and the other guy wont give up

nukes kill underwater bases...

NO rules FTW

I think felix summed it up rather nicely.

Comm = Ends, ftw!

Be nice -Moderator

^Perhaps that wasn't nice.

To Felix, as you first threw a hissy fit at me over D-gunning your base after I killed your Comm in a failed rush of your own (thereby saving you the 40 minutes that I took to kill your allies), I will indeed say, "lol you are sore loser."^^/

Not funny -Moderator

^But that was hysterical. ~~

To NOiZE, if there are meant to be artificial constraints thrown over the game that was given us (presuming that your "NO rules FTW" comment wasn't meant as an edorsement =), then I would suggest that you codify them, preferably on stone tablets, and have SJ or Zaphod (or better yet, Chris Taylor, who endorses these tactics himself) sign off on them. At least then people would have some legitimate grounds for complaint, wouldn't they? We all fall under the auspice of many norms, all of which contribute to the often very different opinions that we have on subjects, but until we form laws with these norms, they carry little weight, and give plenty of excuses for misunderstandings and those "huwt feewings," ya know? =\

To Forboding, Comm Ends doesn't stop a bit of that. I'd recommend forming an exclusive club that absolutely prohibits Comm Bombing, Comm Rushing, Comm Pushing, Comm Defending, and Comm Having to Begin With. Excluding others is kinda a strange thing for a geek to do, though (and we're all geeks here). *Note: this is not a personal attack - this is a variance in opinion, so please don't sic your muppet on me. =(



Dear Moderator: "[For the idiots/Tireds of the world: that last paragraph means that you will be wrong with your accusations of "lol you are sore loser".]" =)

If a player can kill your comm in a comm continues game without losing his own comm you are WAY behind, at any point in the game. The loss of a comm is worth ALOT, comms are bombs, hardcore defence and difficult to hold back offence all in one.

i really think rules like , no commrushing/bombing/napping are a bit silly. It's all in the game if you play continues... so i'm fine with it. But i do prefer game ends... because it makes the game much better imo. Just make sure you keep him defended, and late game keep him cloaked..

Ends is normally more fast-paced anyway, and more fun at least half of the time. Won't stop Atlases, though. Only playing well, or even mediocrely, can stop that. =P

To fix all of the "certified Lame" things... would be super-easy.

It would take me about five minutes... or an hour, for somebody with zero modding experience. Really.

So... please release it as a "type 2" mod, for AA and XTA, and then you're all set, if you can get people to play with you. If you don't know what that is... look it up in the Wiki.

People who're playing mainly for the epic battles, and not for victory... should just play on big maps with others who agree with them, instead of getting grumpy about it, imo... I guess I just don't understand what the whining's about... if you play people on Ashap, you can expect a 15-minute game, against a skilled player, unless you are equally skilled. It's just how things are, pretty much no matter what mod you're playing.

Well, you could simply remove the ability for the commander to dgun and explode... but then again, that kind of castrates TA...

... and you could make comms non-transportable.

And yes, that'd just about eviscerate a lot've the central game-balance... but that's apparantly what some people want. So, I say... let them build it, and see if anybody will play it with them...

I built a defense line at the north of oki river which an enemy player blew up by walking his comm to the defenses and letting it die (in the first 10 minutes of the game).. I know this is valid, but it felt very cheap somehow..

15k of free metal :)