You''re a ragtag bunch of space cowboys. Maybe you''re mercenaries. Maybe you''re pirates. Maybe you''re rangers. You come to the battlefield with what your ships can carry. No refineries. No harvesting. No pumping troops out of a factory. If you build anything, it''ll be fixed gun emplacements, temporary repair bays, or field hospitals. No farms, or upgrade centers, or blacksmithys in this game! You have total freedom to bring to the battle whatever you can afford, steal, or scavenge. No attempt is made at level balance. What''s there is there. If you attack a defenseless hamlet with armored marines, you slaughter them. If you go for a direct assault on an empire''s capitol, you''re particle dust. Recon is up to you, and so is the challenge of biting off only what you can chew. You soldiers, and certain vehicles, can be rearmed with different equipment. Fighters can be given different payloads (bombs for ground targets, missiles for air, and 10 kiloton nukes for those pesky, hard to scratch places). Soldiers can be given different weapons (plasma throwers, accelerator rifles, anti-tank PB lances). Thus to change your strategy you re-equip. The main resource is energy and ammo. Neither can be generated during the battle, but both can be scavenged. Vehicles use energy when they move and either energy (for beam weapons) or ammo when they fire. Soldiers without power armor are the same, except they don''t use energy when they move. Energy is represented by a second "health" bar. Battles are fought on a bounded level, like in Starcraft. Each level represents a sector on a planetary grid. Unlike in Starcraft, units can enter and exit the map from neighboring sectors. That means that you or the AI can hold reinforcements off map and call them in after a certain delay. So, you can pick whatever fight you want, and as an attacker you can bug out at any time. Comments? What do you think, especially about totally axing the whole build cycle? I left stuff out to streamline, btw, so any questions please ask. -------------------- Just waiting for the mothership...

Wouldn''t that be a RTT?
Real-Time Tactics Game that is.

Because, your logistics start becoming important between battles, and yet battles are straight-on, short-lived slugfests. This could be a very nice system, specially because it would also work online, with a world where in a lot of people have a "home ship" or something for all their resources, and they can pick fights on any planet around. When the other player agrees, they can slug it out.

Could work very well, with not a lot of effort above the normal implementation of an RTS


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MAdKeith Well, no, THAT would be RTS, and we play so far would be RTT

anyway, Wavinator, I have two words for you, Rogue Trader !!!

If you don''t know what that is, I''ll look up some links for you.

youpla :-P

I wonder what consequences this would have on the AI. In most RTS games that I have played, the AI tends to try to win by cranking out troops faster than is humanly possible (as computers are very good at optimizing the simple economies of most RTS''s).

In this system, that could not work and the AI would have to be written to use some actual tactics. I''m imagining an AI that would actually do things like lay traps, attack exposed flanks, exploit a break in its opponents lines, etc. There is some real potential for significant advances in RTS (or RTT) AI with this.

quote: Original post by ahw

anyway, Wavinator, I have two words for you, Rogue Trader !!!

If you don''t know what that is, I''ll look up some links for you.

youpla :-P

Please do!



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Just waiting for the mothership...

quote: Original post by MadKeithV

Because, your logistics start becoming important between battles, and yet battles are straight-on, short-lived slugfests.

Yeah, this is what I had in mind. I hope that it will focus the game on strategy more than rush tactics. Because units are more finite, you''d have to really put your forces in the right place and make them count. No more suicide packs of zerglings / marines pouring into your base!

quote:
This could be a very nice system, specially because it would also work online, with a world where in a lot of people have a "home ship" or something for all their resources, and they can pick fights on any planet around. When the other player agrees, they can slug it out.

Thanks. My focus is on single and possibly LAN play, but I could see this being used in a MMOG.

quote:
Could work very well, with not a lot of effort above the normal implementation of an RTS

Right, the changes are in gameplay, rather than in technology (where they mostly should be )




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Just waiting for the mothership...

quote: Original post by Mikyyf

I wonder what consequences this would have on the AI. In most RTS games that I have played, the AI tends to try to win by cranking out troops faster than is humanly possible (as computers are very good at optimizing the simple economies of most RTS''s).

In this system, that could not work and the AI would have to be written to use some actual tactics. I''m imagining an AI that would actually do things like lay traps, attack exposed flanks, exploit a break in its opponents lines, etc. There is some real potential for significant advances in RTS (or RTT) AI with this.

Finally!!!! Imagine being able to play against an AI who couldn''t fall back on a perfect build cycle leading to the inevitable rush? One that couldn''t afford to myopically focus on local problems, but instead would have to think globally.

Obviously, it''s not an easy task, or it would have been done long ago. But like in RPGs, I think there are certain design mechanisms in RTS games that allow developers to get away with what I''ve heard called "stupid AI tricks" like trigger-based scripting and the perfect build rush.




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Just waiting for the mothership...

Wavinator, this may sound strange but you might want to have a look at the thread i started in the Artifical Intelligence forum. The thread is named with something to do with left handed people. But its actually about gathering information about the player in order to provide a more snug/customised ai. You might find it interesting, i dunno.

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