Spring RTS Engine

As some of you know, I have taken over Noize's position concerning XTA (he has moved on to other things)

I would just like to show a quick snippet of the few changes to come:
(Links contain roll-over images)

Spider

Zipper

Nuke (F1 View)

I'm thinking the pop-up artillery needs a range nerf. It dominates small maps too much.

u r 4 |3(_)/\/(H0 \/\//-/1/\/\/3|2z


hmph...

xta is perfect, go play aa.

After thruth is told, i wish great success to new generation of xta series.

imho


Spiders, only need shot speed nerf (smallish), maybe emg type too.

Zippers are fine.

Nuke is currently too cheap for the output, but that is fine for me, ... if you are making it bigger, so should be the cost.

Popups.. are a cheap tactic, but cant stand a good lvl1 attack, or planned lvl2 strike.

Maybe bit more build time? or small (small) cost increase.

range is fine, accuracy maybe is too high.


Jethroes die to buch of rockos.. its just "closed minded" players building just and only one unit taking away the fun, (debatable) but true. (they die to rockos as commander does too, and spiders aswell btw).


Rest is either map/abuse/porc/pork/other. that happens quite often.

What about the cans and fleas, cans are about 150 metal too much and fleas are atleast 10,000 too much buildtime and energy.

My vote is to listen to Mongus, coz he plays XTA a lot.

We shouldn't make all the changes at once, it's best to go little by little. So even though I think the suggestions are good, I think it is best to wait. Changes can have effects that you don't see until after a few weeks of play. AA has suffered from too large and too frequent rebalancing.

Well I was playing Lowland Crossing with SJ and he agreed with me that the popup artillery needs some sort of nerf. I'm not particularly concerned wether its range or accuracy or whatever, but it really is far too powerful for the money. On lunar maps it has even more crazy range.

Other than that, the Spiders and Zippers don't bother me that much. The nerfs being proposed are very minor anyway. I like XTA more than AA. It's not as slow paced. It's a pity there are so few games of it running.

What do you guys think about friendly fire? Make the direct fire units work a bit better in groups, instead of needing annoying micromanagement. Of course you'd have to rebalance them a tad to compensate.

Molloy wrote:Well I was playing Lowland Crossing with SJ and he agreed with me that the popup artillery needs some sort of nerf. I'm not particularly concerned wether its range or accuracy or whatever, but it really is far too powerful for the money. On lunar maps it has even more crazy range.

I think you're right, but I will want to wait and see what unexpected changes this rebalance might cause. For nerfing, I'd suggest a 20 or 30% build time increase.

Molloy wrote:What do you guys think about friendly fire? Make the direct fire units work a bit better in groups, instead of needing annoying micromanagement. Of course you'd have to rebalance them a tad to compensate.

I like friendly fire because it makes ballistic units more valuable when there are a lot of them, and it makes kbots more valuable because they are harder to hit friendly-ly.

I also like it because it makes you think about where you alloctate your valuable resource of micromanagement time.

Hmm I don't know about the change of the Spider weapon; I liked how it looked before. In v8 it just looks like a Flash cannon, which is a pity, because AFAIK the Spider's weapon was unique in v7. I assume it stills stuns though.

The adjustments of the ranges of both the Zipper and Spider sounds like a good idea though.

And Myg, be sure to include unit icons in v8. I'd be happy to make you some, just PM me about it.

If left the way it was, the spider would still be able to paralyse planes, which in its v8 state, cant.

While you're at it, could you replace the Arm Flash's model with something nicer? There's a pretty nice one in BOTA, think it was part of the evolva models but I'm not sure.


One of the sleeve's Y coordinate has to be fixed though, there's 0.2 difference, but it can be easily done in upspring.

im totally against big changes to weapon ranges.


That proposed range for the spider and the zipper are really otaish(that is silly), this is not TA, remember..

try to balance by other means, maybe 5-10% range change for testing.


also, the emp could be blue....


on a side note.. well the problem with spider is actually this.

the stun level doesnt get reset when the unit "recovers".

Instead of that, it just falls down slowly, which mean if the unit gets touched by the stun laser, it will be paralized inmediatly.

Units that already got back from paralized state, should recover faster than units being paralized. that way its more risky, and less effective, and can get out of control easier. (which in this case is good).

Myg wrote:If left the way it was, the spider would still be able to paralyse planes, which in its v8 state, cant.

Onlytargetcategory should solve this. just give all non-aircraft a shared category tag, then give the spider onlytargetcategory=LAND (or whatever your category name is)

Or, if you want it to still have the possibility of paralyzing planes, give it a badtargetcategory vs aircraft

Myg wrote:If left the way it was, the spider would still be able to paralyse planes, which in its v8 state, cant.

I was only talking about the way it *looks*. Cant you keep its current look while making the other modifications?

Btw I made some unit icons which can be used in mods:
http://teake.home.fmf.nl/temp/unit_icons.zip

If you'd like to use it in XTA you'll have to add a line "iconType=xxx" in the FBI file of every unit. It might be some work, but it'll looks very nice :-).

colorblind plz pm me when u can, the knoxians have need of the contense of ur skull!

Something i noticed,

The core com is bigger then the cordecom, that should be fixed

Last time i played (months but still XTAv7?), if a pop-up is within range of a Guardian, the Guardian stands little chance. Not because the Guardian is too weak, in my mind, but because the pop is too acurate or has too much damage per second.

As up to me, pop's are extremely effective ofensive weapons because they have a high damage per second as well as perfect accuracy for they're 1300 of range. A pop guarded by some laser towers is a fearsome weapon until it's range.

I woldn't change the range, by no means, but i would prefer if the pop's wouldn't waste everything that is within range so quickly (if one of your factories hapens to come under fire by a pop, it's a sure gonner).

I will retexture the core silencer soner or later.
It was requested by noize and I didn't had much time since. (and I won't have much time 'till next week) but it will be fixed!

PauloMorfeo------------I woldn't change the range, by no means, but i would prefer if the pop's wouldn't waste everything that is within range so quickly (if one of your factories hapens to come under fire by a pop, it's a sure gonner).

well, some discution has gon on about the accuracy of the popup. Its health and range dosent seem to be the question but perhaps its accuracy.This should keep most peeps happy, however this is not the priority as of yet.

Im not toaly convinced the popup should be narfed, however it is very powerfull if used strategically with a jammer whilst being built.(As GamesMaster would know!)

If anny of u out there have opinions about this plz leave a post. The more interest a change has to you the community, the more chance it has to change.