Spring RTS Engine

Very simply, I'd like a tag that causes a unit to not be counted towards overall unit-limits. The units would also need to not be counted towards victory conditions (i.e., if the game is set to non-ComDeath = End, and all units that have CountTowardUnitLimit=1 are dead, then you win).

This would allow for the creation of several new types of gameplay.

Finally, minefields limited by their energy upkeep rather than by number! I see positive applications for E&E at least.

Me dreams of Artillery deployed Mines... No more buildingprocess... Oh, wrong Thread -

Yeah, I'd really like to see this; it'd be great for SWS.

In that case, you'd probably also want to see lifespan limits on units, since being able to build unlimited numbers of certain types of units is going to be really painful.

And yes, I want weapons that spawn units on impact (or fire units out of their muzzle). Imagine nuke-stile buildables that deep-strike.

Pxtl wrote:In that case, you'd probably also want to see lifespan limits on units

Life span would just annoy me, too much micro.

Well, lifespan, or negative-regen-to-death, or energy/metal-use for living. Something. Anything to keep them from spiralling out of control population-wise.

Either way, the hard unit-limit isn't supposed to be a gameplay feature - it's a hardware limitation. Imho, one needs a proper "supply" resource to get fair balancing out of a unit limit - after all, a unit limit that treats a peewee the same as a Krogoth is obviously a problem.

Imho, mods need to have features that make the hard "unit limit" impossible to reach. For BA/AA, I'd just have a fixed menu defined "control limit" in the place of the hard unit limit, and have the "control limit" cognisant of the comparative value of units.

While this would be nice, a broader change that would solve this and open up other doors would be to allow player-built features to have weapons and proper scripts.

I'd say, given that it's at the modders disposal, it would be at the modders hand to ensure that using this tag on a unit does not get abused (ie: ensuring that the player won't build billions of them, or if they are going to be used heavily, that they're only a few polygons, etc. )

Yeah, I'll have to agree with Nemo on revisiting this. However, this suggestion would allow for side-defined objects like mines to remain biased.

Sure Nemo, but if it's a choice between this or nothing, I pick this.

Pxtl wrote:Well, lifespan, or negative-regen-to-death, or energy/metal-use for living. Something. Anything to keep them from spiralling out of control population-wise.

script the unit so that it detonates a small weapon every second that takes a bit of health off.

EDIT: We also have individual unit-limits don't forget

The individual unit limit is independent of the total units, so that is a good way to control spam units like mines.

MadRat wrote:The individual unit limit is independent of the total units, so that is a good way to control spam units like mines.

Really needs a Unit CLASS limit, though, so you could limit the total number of mines and still have a variety of mines....

Or have multiple superheavies, but only 1 can be built at a time....

This would obviously be very useful to us. A related issue is having units which don't need to be killed in a comm-continues game, like mines and sandbags (S44 sandbags are units to allow friendlies to fire through them but not enemies). Obviously it could be tied to this tag or implemented seperately for maximum flexibility.

Until then I'd use the workaround to mark all important units/structures as commanders and recommending com ends game (most RTSes cause a game end once all production buildings are destroyed).

We considered that but are not sure if there would be issues with storage

While we're on the subject i'd like to see unit specific limits configurable in the lobby. So we can have for example a max of 20 aircraft to prevent the game slowing down too much and crashing.

EXit_W0und wrote:While we're on the subject i'd like to see unit specific limits configurable in the lobby. So we can have for example a max of 20 aircraft to prevent the game slowing down too much and crashing.

They are, thats what the unit button is for. It just needs fixing...

If you're talking about unit class (air, sea, land, building, hover, othercrap) then it is a subcatagory of class restricting...

Really, the preset sliders in the game-preconfig are anachronisms from TA. The fact is that this is something that needs to be mod-defined (what sliders, what limits)...

The problem is that scripting interaction between the sliders (or other theoretical selectables) and the FBI files would be tricky... really, at that point we're straying out of Spring and into OSRTS territory.